Quotes About Cats

Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

A happy arrangement: many people prefer cats to other people, and many cats prefer people to other cats.

Cats have a sort of game they play when they meet. A player alternates between watching the strange cat and ignoring her, grooming or examining everything around herself - a dead leaf, a cloud - with complete absorption. It is almost accidental how the two cats approach, a sidelong step and then the sitting again. This often ends in a flurry of spitting and slashing claws, too fast to see clearly, and then one or the other (or both) of the cats leap out of range. The game can have one exchange or many - and is not so different from the first meetings of women.

Why do cats sleep so much? Perhaps they've been trusted with some major cosmic task, an essential law of physics - such as: if there are less than five million cats sleeping at any one time the world will stop spinning.

People who don't like cats haven't been around them. There's the old joke: dogs have masters, cats have staff.

Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function.

I like cats. I used to have a lot of cats, but I don't anymore, now I just have a dog. It does take a certain temperament to have a cat, as they do have certain personalities.

I never thought of myself as explaining cats in general. I simply viewed the cats I have known as characters in my life, often as quirky and complex as the humans with whom I have spent time.

Cats do what cats do, ducks do what ducks do, and eagles do what eagles, do. If you take a duck and ask it to do an eagles' job, shame on you. As a leader, your job is to help your ducks to become better ducks and your eagles better eagles - to put individuals in the right places and help them reach their potential.

Cats and their owners are on a private, exclusive loop of affection. Thus cats have become symbolic of a community eschewed and a hyper-engagement with oneself. They represent the profound danger of growing so independent in New York that it's not merely that you don't need anyone - it's that you don't know how to need anyone.

For all cats have this particularity, each and every one, from the meanest alley sneaker to the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiff's pillow — we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quite Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether it's been fun or it's been not. So all cats have a politician's air; we smile and smile and so they think we're villains

I always see to the dogs first and leave the cats and the occasional birds and rabbits and hamsters for later. It isn't that I play favorites, it's just that dogs are needier than other pets. Leave a dog alone for very long and it'll start going a little nuts. Cats, on the other hand, try to give you the impression that they didn't even notice you were gone. Oh, were you out? they'll say, I didn't notice. Then they'll raise their tails to show you their little puckered anuses and walk away.

People project all sorts of emotions onto their cats, and cats like it that way.

I have known some horses and a good many more pigs who I believe harbored evil intent in their hearts. I will go further and say all cats are wicked, though often useful. Who has not seen Satan in their sly faces?

Animals like crows, owls or black cats are not ominous at all; it is the men's superstitious mind which is the inauspicious one!

I'm a cat person. I have two giant cats [Harry and Arturo] that I call the small panthers. They're like 17 pounds each-they're big boys! Every photo on my phone is of them doing something funny.

In the matter of animals I love only cats, but I love them unreasonably for their qualities and in spite of their numerous faults. I have only one, but I could not live without a cat.

Even cats grow lonely and anxious.

When we get the remote Russian village online, what will get people to the Internet is not going to be reports from Human Rights Watch. It's going to be pornography, 'Sex and the City,' or maybe funny videos of cats.

I trained three or four days a week for two and a half months, before they'd even let me near the real dress. And I destroyed two practice dresses completely. They were just ripped to shreds. They looked like cats had gotten a hold of them.

Organizing atheists is like hurding cats

He had an uncommon fondness for cats. As an old man summering in New Hampshire, Twain even rented kittens from a nearby farm to keep him company until he returned home. "If man could be crossed with the cat," said Twain, "it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat." There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

When a scientist considers all high-tech mental machinery needed to arrange words into ordinary sentences, prescriptive rules are, at best, inconsequential little decorations. The very fact that they have to be drilled shows that they are alien to the natural workings of the language system. One can choose to obsess over prescriptive rules, but they have no more to do with language than the criteria for judging cats at a cat show have to do with mammalian biology.

Cats may sense early on that you don't like paw prints on your butter, but they will jump onto any surface in the home as long as no one sees it happen.

I always tell people that I was fortunate I was able to come in with a group of men. We didn't come into the game with a group of boys. We were young then. So your cats keep you in check.

I have always been an animal lover. I had a hard time disassociating the animals I cuddled with - dogs and cats, for example - from the animals on my plate, and I never really cared for the taste of meat. I always loved my Brussels sprouts.

They say cats have nine lives. I've had 12 already and I don't know how many more I'll have.

Dogs like everyone. Cats choose who to like.

[on going to Sunday school:] It looks like rain, and I hope it will rain cats and dogs and hammers and pitchforks and silver sugar spoons and hay ricks and paper-covered novels and picture frames and rag carpets and toothpicks and skating rinks and birds of paradise and roof gardens and burdocks and French grammars before Sunday school time.

I have a family and two cats; I get up with my kids early in the morning.

When all candles be out, all cats be grey.

Because I’m a cat. A big one, the Panther of Rough Storms, in fact. But still a cat. If there’s a saucer of milk to spill, I’d rather spill it than let it lie. If my mistress grows absent-minded and leaves a ball of yarn about, I’ll bat it between my paws, and unravel it. Because it’s fun. Because it’s what cats do best.

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

We have relationships with many different things, creatures and beings. We have relationships with cats, with dogs, with horses, and we know that there are certain things they can't do. So we'll add robots to that list, and we'll learn what they can and cannot do. No harm, no foul.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

I am a huge animal lover. Growing up, my mother and I rescued countless animals - dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, even a turtle. I have been accused of caring more about animals than I do about people.

Cats are fond of mooning.

Cats are distant, discreet, impeccably clean and able to stay silent. What more could be needed to be good company?

But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near.

I like dogs, but I have more respect for cats.

It doesn't do to be sentimental about cats; the best ones don't respect you for it

I focused on the passing houses filled with couples who’d somehow survived this teenage craziness of ‘he likes her but she likes him and he likes somebody else, you just can’t win.’ How did they do it? How did they end up in their golden, warm and cozy living rooms with their 2.3 children and dogs and cats? Because getting from where I was to where they were seemed millions of light years away.

One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.

You can keep a dog: but it is the cat who keeps people, because cats find humans useful domestic animals.

Cats are unpredictable because they're wild and domestic at the same time. Watching a cat's behavior is like a small window into the wild.

As a fan, I'm distraught, but as a cartoonist looking at new vacant spaces in 2400 newspapers, well, behind me, my cats are dancing a conga line.

Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.