Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences. What happened in the past is lived again in memory. ...About what goes on today hangs a cloud of thoughts concerning similar things undergone in bygone days. With the animals, an experience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things. Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of merely physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. A stone is not merely hard, a thing into which one bumps; but it is a monument of a deceased ancestor. A flame is not merely something which warms or burns, but is a symbol of the enduring life of the household, of the abiding source of cheer, nourishment and shelter to which man returns from his casual wanderings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In trying to understand the appeal of best-sellers, it is well to remember that whistles can be made sounding certain notes which ...are clearly audible to dogs and other of the lower animals, though man is incapable of hearing them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are attracted strongly to Nature. In their reaction to Nature... men appear to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world Kosmos, Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so, and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art... mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In all cases, excepting those of the bear and leopard, the female is less spirited than the male; in regard to the two exceptional... cases, the superiority in courage rests with the female. With all other animals the female is softer in disposition than the male, is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of the young; the male, on the other hand, is more spirited than the female, more savage, more simple and less cunning. The traces of these differentiated characteristics are more or less visible everywhere, but they are especially visible where character is the more developed, and most of all in man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the devel...opment of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals. Yet nowhere ...in a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal's gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Animals are ever so psychic. There are some people who just can't come in here.... The cats particularly. They seem to know. You c...an fool everybody, but landy M deary-me, you can't fool a cat. They seem to know who's not right, if you know what I mean.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Researchers, with science as their authority, will be able to cut [animals] up, alive, into small pieces, drop them from a great h...eight to see if they are shattered by the fall, or deprive them of sleep for sixteen days and nights continuously for the purposes of an iniquitous monograph.... "Animal trust, undeserved faith, when at last will you turn away from us? Shall we never tire of deceiving, betraying, tormenting animals before they cease to trust us?"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The world of animals in captivity offers us at once a prophetic glimpse and a caricature of the world in which modern man lives ou...t his life. The animal suffers psychologically and his suffering is not unlike that of man himself, since its world is characterized by deterioration of its environment and by its own degradation. The causes are the same in both cases: the increase in the number of individuals occupying a limited amount of space and the necessity for existing in a society in conflict with nature. Just as men occasionally reject society and retreat into a misanthropic solitude which sometimes impels them to murder, so, too, animals in a zoo--baboons, for example--suffer from, and are deformed by, lack of sufficient space for them to lead a harmonious social existence. When captivity has done its work and an animal has become truly dangerous, it then becomes necessary to isolate it in a cage of its own.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »