Herman Melville Quotes

Pet lovers know that animals sometimes understand us better than we do, and the annals of human sin and desire provide plenty of stories to drive the point home.

if we don't always understand animals, they always understand us.

All the feeling which my father could not put into words was in his hand-any dog, child or horse would recognize the kindness of it.

You don't know what mental telepathy exists from the human to the animal.

There ain't a man livin' who hasn't talked to his dog.

Animals are a continuous source of inspiration and wonder to me. I would love to play a dog.

It's kind of amazing how well you can get to know someone without talking.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior. I am really interested in feelings and think they are what define us as a species. When you really get it right in acting, it's an act of empathy. You feel less distant from others, and that is really exciting.

We think the whole world's going to change, and forget that human beings are still human beings; we have the same five senses, we still interact the same way, we still love and hate the same way, but marketers lose track of that. But then it comes down to earth.

I felt such a deep connection with dolphins. I felt like they were the only ones who understood me.

The dog is almost human in its demand for living interest, yet fatally less than human in its inability to foresee.

What separates humans from other animals is our empathy. With the possible exception of bonobos, we are the most empathetic animal on the planet.

The eyes are so telling. That's how you engage with people and bond with them. I love direct, strong eye contact.

I've got a lot of people that are really good at taming animals and working with animals; and they can't explain how they do. They just get a feeling from the animal.

She had no particular breed in mind, no unusual requirements. Except the special sense of mutual recognition that tells dog and human they have both come to the right place.

Humans will always tell you the story. Dogs can only tell you the truth. Trust your instincts and listen your dog.

I speak with dogs frequently. They don't really talk, but I feel they're communicating.

Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal—indeed, deeply human—to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision—a creature—of the purest sweetness?

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

I don't want five hundred billion neural chips. I want guts.

Animals have always left me with a curiosity about human nature. I trust animals more than most people.

It often happens that a man is more humanely related to a cat or dog than to any human being.

For fidelity, devotion, love, many a two-legged animal is below the dog and the horse. Happy would it be for thousands of people if they could stand at last before the Judgment Seat and say, I have loved as truly and have lived as decently as my dog, and yet we call them only brutes.

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs.

The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.