Favorite Quotes Page 2

“Every day our dogs show us another reason why we give them our hearts. We love them because they embody the triumph of spirit over mortality.

And being spirits, they never die. It is through the window of their brief lives that we glimpse eternity.” Alston Chase

“Once or perhaps twice in a lifetime, if one is lucky, one knows a dog who is very, very special. What makes a dog special? I don’t know. It’s mysterious. An unseen link, an emotional gravity too strong to resist pulls dog and person together, and they become soulmates.”

Alston Chase from: “We Give Our Hearts to Dogs to Tear”

“One must be really quite blind not to recognize that the essential and principal thing in the animal and man are the same…animals feel compassion too, hence humans have no monopoly on virtue and “the eternal being, as it lives in us, also lives in every animal”. I would have no pleasure living in a world where dogs did not exist.” Arthur Schopenhauer 1840

“People who love dogs often talk about a “lifetime” dog. Lifetime dogs intersect with our lives with particular impact; they’re dogs we love in especially powerful, sometimes inexplicable ways. While we may cherish other pets, we may never feel that particular kind of connection with any of the rest. For lack of a better term, they are dogs we fall in love with. “

From “A Good Dog” by Jon Katz

“I have sometimes thought of the final cause of dogs having such short lives and I am quite satisfied it is in compassion to the human race, for if we suffer so much in losing a dog after an acquaintance of ten or twelve years, what would it be if they were to double that time?”

Sir Walter Scott

“O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our little brothers to whom Thou hast given this earth as their home in common with us. May we realize that they live not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee, and that they love the sweetness of life even as we, and serve Thee better in their place than we in ours.”

St. Basil the Great 370 A.D.

The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigor, strength and swiftness which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed…as a recompense for what they once suffered…they shall enjoy happiness suited to their tastes, without alloy, without interruption and without end.

John Wesley

Grace has as much to do with how we give to others as with what we receive from God

Stephen Webb from “On God and Dogs”

Every act of making animals suffer harm, pain or deprivation for our pleasure or entertainment is a practical sign of our ungenerosity to God. It shows that we have not begun even in a minimal way to grasp divine benevolence. Andrew Linzey

I would not give much for that man’s religion whose cat and dog are not the better for it

Abraham Lincoln

FAVORITE ANIMAL QUOTES, CONTINUED

Dogs are in general more skilled at belief than we are Vicki Hearne “Adam’s Task”: Calling Animals by Name”

They too, are created by the same loving hand of God which created us…It is our duty to protect them and to promote their well being.

Mother Teresa

We are creatures capable of tender mercies, gestures of love that can wound as well as heal. Somewhere in the heart of that wanton gesture…lies an act of transcendence…

In which we reach beyond ourselves in defiance of prudence and calculation, and endow the other, the animal other, with the affection that is not merely a diversion from a heartless world but an eschatological statement about who we want to be, a rebellious act against the restraints of moderation, and a claim upon some sort of truth that I cannot but help to understand as religious, as spiritual, as a reaching toward some encompassing realm of love, toward some concrete place where all excessive acts one day will be mutual, will circulate like endless gifts continually returned even as they are again given away-a mutuality born, sustained, and guided by a blessed excess.