This is just a beginning, to which I’ll add others:

“It’s a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn’t their life and our life. Nor your life and my life. That it’s just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.” ~Kate Forster

Emily Dickinson, a Transcendentalist poet, wrote, “If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain. If I can ease one life the aching, or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain. “

Albert Scheitzer wrote a prayer that I’ll share with you. “Hear our humble prayer, O God, for our friends the animals, especially for animals who are suffering, for any that are lost, or deserted or frightened or hungry; for all that must be put to death. We entreat them all thy mercy…and for those who deal with them we ask a heart of compassion and gentle hands and kindly words.”

“Do you remember how you felt about animals when you were a child? That is how you still feel about them. All you have to do is unbury the feelings.” ~Peter Miller

“Anyone who says that life matters less to animals than it does to us has not held in his hands an animal fighting for its life. The whole of the being of the animal is thrown into that fight without reserve.” ~J. M. Coetzee

“The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.” ~Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.” ~Peter Singer, Animal Liberation

“Thousands of people who say they love animals sit down once or twice a day to enjoy the flesh of creatures who have been utterly deprived of everything that could make their lives worth living and who endured the … terror of the abattoirs.” ~Dr. Jane Goodall

“Every single act of Compassion makes a difference, and increases the ratio of happiness to suffering, one step at a time.”

“Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.” Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Happiness

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white or women were created for men.” ~ Alice Walker”

Animal Sentience, Emotions and Intelligence Pinterest Board