Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Quotes

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.

What struck me whenever I visited a farm was how much more sophisticated was the life the animals were capable of living than was assumed by those exploiting them. The more we are willing to see about their lives, the more we will see. Humans seem to take perverse pleasure in attributing stupidity to animals when it is almost always entirely a question of human ignorance.

Questers of the truth, that’s who dogs are; seekers after the invisible scent of another being’s authentic core.

Animals love and suffer, cry and laugh; their hearts rise up in anticipation and fall in despair...they feel.

Dogs love us not only because we feed them, walk them, or groom them, or protect them, but because we are fun. How astonishing!

Animals are, like us, endangered species on an endangered planet, and we are the ones who are endangering them, it, and ourselves. They are innocent sufferers in a hell of our making.

After a lifetime of affectionate regard for dogs and many years of close observation and reflection, I have reached the conclusion that dogs feel more than I do (I am not prepared to speak for other people). They feel more, and they feel more purely and more intensely.

Dogs never lie about love.

The curiosity of cats is, like their affection, of a purity and intensity rarely seen in humans. We would be jaded when faced with the fiftieth paper bag. Not so our cats.

Every time I told my cocker spaniel, Taffy, my very first dog, that we were going for a walk, she would launch into a celebratory dance that ended with her racing around the room, always clockwise, and faster and faster, as if her joy could not be possibly contained. Even as a young boy I knew that hardly any creature could express joy so vividly as a dog.

We might miss the sign or we may be unable to read the expression, but it is almost a contradiction in terms to say that a dog feels something but does not show it. What a dog feels, a dog shows, and, conversely, what a dog shows, a dog actually does feel.

We need cats to need us. It unnerves us that they do not. However, if they do not need us, they nonetheless seem to love us.

Hardly any animal can look as deeply disappointed as a dog to whom one says "no."

Many people have heard the remarkable example of devotion involving a Skye terrier dog who worked for a Scottish shepherd named Old Jock. In 1858, the day after Jock was buried (with almost nobody present to mourn him except his shaggy dog) in the churchyard at Greyfriars Abbey in Edinburgh, Bobby was found sleeping on his master's grave, where he continued to sleep every night for fourteen years.