Dogs Quotes

“Slowly, Anna put up a hand to his muzzle and began to scratch that spot behind the ear where large dogs keep their souls.”
― Eva Ibbotson, A Countess Below Stairs

“They [dogs] never talk about themselves but listen to you while you talk about yourself, and keep up an appearance of being interested in the conversation. ”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“Owning a dog is slightly less expensive than being addicted to crack.”
― Jen Lancaster, Bitter Is the New Black: Confessions of a Condescending, Egomaniacal, Self-Centered Smartass, Or, Why You Should Never Carry A Prada Bag to the Unemployment Office

“Perhaps one central reason for loving dogs is that they take us away from this obsession with ourselves. When our thoughts start to go in circles, and we seem unable to break away, wondering what horrible event the future holds for us, the dog opens a window into the delight of the moment.”
― Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Dogs Never Lie About Love: Reflections on the Emotional World of Dogs

“Men cannot grieve as dogs do. But they grieve for many years.”
― Robin Hobb, Assassin's Apprentice

“Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance, and to turn around three times before lying down.”
― Robert Benchley

“There is no faith which has never yet been broken, except that of a truly faithful dog”
― Konrad Lorenz

“Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks.”
― Roger Caras

“Over the years I've come to appreciate how animals enter our lives prepared to teach and far from being burdened by an inability to speak they have many different ways to communicate. It is up to us to listen more than hear, to look into more than past.”
― Nick Trout, Love Is the Best Medicine: What Two Dogs Taught One Veterinarian about Hope, Humility, and Everyday Miracles

“I always like a dog so long as he isn't spelled backward.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“They had buried him under our elm tree, they said -- yet this was not totally true. For he really lay buried in my heart.”
― Willie Morris, My Dog Skip

“The dog has seldom been successful in pulling man up to its level of sagacity, but man has frequently dragged the dog down to his.”
― James Thurber

“We're going to investigate," Fireheart meowed. "We can't decide how to get rid of these dogs until we know exactly what we have to face. We're not going to attack them, not yet-have you got that, Cloudtail?"
Cloudtail's blue eyes burned into his, and he did not reply.
"I won't take you, Cloudtail, unless you promise to do as you're told without question."
"Oh, all right." The tip of Cloudtail's tail flicked irritably. "I want every last dog turned into crowfood, but I'll do it you're way, Fireheart."
"Good." Fireheart's gaze swept over the rest of the patrol. "Any questions?"
"What if we come across Tigerstar?" asked Sandstorm.
"A cat from another Clan on our territory?" Fireheart bared his teeth. "Yes, you can attack him.
Cloudtil let out a growl of satisfaction.”
― Erin Hunter, A Dangerous Path

“I say, thirteen is too many dogs for good mental health. Five is pretty much the limit. More than five dogs and you forfeit your right to call yourself entirely sane.
Even if the dogs are small.”
― E. Lockhart, The Boyfriend List: 15 Guys, 11 Shrink Appointments, 4 Ceramic Frogs and Me, Ruby Oliver

“We humans may be brilliant and we may be special, but we are still connected to the rest of life. No one reminds us of this better than our dogs. Perhaps the human condition will always include attempts to remind ourselves that we are separate from the rest of the natural world. We are different from other animals; it's undeniably true. But while acknowledging that, we must acknowledge another truth, the truth that we are also the same. That is what dogs and their emotions give us-- a connection. A connection to life on earth, to all that binds and cradles us, lest we begin to feel too alone. Dogs are our bridge-- our connection wo who we really are, and most tellingly, who we want to be. When we call them home to us, it'as as if we are calling for home itself. And that'll do, dogs. That'll do.”
― Patricia McConnell, For the Love of a Dog: Understanding Emotion in You and Your Best Friend

“I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”
― Alexander Pope

“Coraline opened the box of chocolates. The dog looked at them longingly.
"Would you like one?" she asked the little dog.
"Yes, please," whispered the dog. "Only not toffee ones. They make me drool."
"I thought chocolates weren't very good for dogs," she said, remembering something Miss Forcible had once told her.
"Maybe where you come from," whispered the little dog. "Here, it's all we eat.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“The dogs brought it all back to, you know, to the human side.”
― Luis Carlos Montalván, Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him

“Hounds follow those who feed them.”
― Otto von Bismarck

“We are meaning-seeking creatures. Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value”
― Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

“Brightpaw's eye opened and she fixed a cloudy gaze on Fireheart.
"What happened?" he repeated. "What did this?"
A thin wailing came from Brightpaw, which gradually formed into words. Fireheart stared at her in horror as he made out what she was trying to say.
"Pack, pack," she whispered. "Kill, kill.”
― Erin Hunter, A Dangerous Path

“Dogs own space and cats own time.”
― Nicola Griffith, Hild

“Men are like dogs," Stacy was fond of saying. And she usually went on to add that, like dogs, they all took up too much space on the bed, and they always went for the crotch.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Smooth Talking Stranger

“But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him.

The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind.

Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.”
― Mary Oliver, Dog Songs: Poems

“Songwriting is a bitch. And then it has puppies”
― Steven Tyler

“Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.”
― Mark Twain

“You should see my corgis at sunset in the snow. It's their finest hour. About five o'clock they glow like copper. Then they come in and lie in front of the fire like a string of sausages.”
― Tasha Tudor, The Private World of Tasha Tudor

“Any man with money to make the purchase may become a dog's owner. But no man --spend he ever so much coin and food and tact in the effort-- may become a dog's Master without consent of the dog. Do you get the difference? And he whom a dog once unreservedly accepts as Master is forever that dog's God.”
― Albert Payson Terhune, Lad: A Dog

“No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.”
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being