Tongues Got Their Cats
This is a clowder of quotes about . . . cats.
| The only thing a cat worries about is what's happening right now. | Lloyd Alexander |
| Perhaps one reason we are fascinated by cats is because such a small animal can contain so much independence, dignity, and freedom of spirit. Unlike the dog, the cat’s personality is never bet on a human’s. He demands acceptance on his own terms. | Lloyd Alexander |
| As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat. | Ellen Perry Berkeley |
| A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch. | Charles M. Blow |
| That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. | Ray Bradbury |
| Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause the most inconvenience. | Pam Brown |
| Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you're feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you'll feel better because they know that everything is just as it is. There's nothing to get excited about. They just know. They're saviours. | Charles Bukowski |
| Like all pure creatures, cats are practical. | William S. Burroughs |
| My relationships with my cats has saved me from a deadly, pervasive ignorance. | William S. Burroughs |
| It is very inconvenient habit of kittens (Alice had once made the remark) that, whatever you say to them they always purr. | Lewis Carroll |
| Cats choose us; we don’t own them. | Kristin Cast |
| A kitten is the delight of a household. All day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor. | Champfleury |
| I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul. | Jean Cocteau |
| Just watching my cats can make me happy. | Paula Cole |
| There are no ordinary cats. | Collette |
| The smallest feline is a masterpiece. | Leonardo da Vinci |
| Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons. | Robertson Davies |
| Way down deep, we’re all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them. | Jim Davis |
| Cats rule the world. | Jim Davis |
| What greater gift than the love of a cat? | Charles Dickens |
| You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat. | Albert Einstein |
| Making movies is like herding cats. | Eric Fellner |
| Time spent with cats is never wasted. | Sigmund Freud |
| A cat will be your friend, but never your slave. | Theophile Gautier |
| Cats know how to obtain food without labor, shelter without confinement, and love without penalties. | W. L. George |
| How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven. | Robert A. Heinlein |
| Never try to out-stubborn a cat. | Robert A. Heinlein |
| A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not. | Ernest Hemingway |
| One cat just leads to another. | Ernest Hemingway |
| Cats are connoisseurs of comfort. | James Herriot |
| I have felt cats rubbing their faces against mine and touching my cheek with claws carefully sheathed. These things, to me, are expressions of love. | James Herriot |
| Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God. | Christopher Hitchens |
| There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat. | Tay Hohoff |
| Kittens are angels with whiskers. | Alexis Flora Hope |
| If you want to write, keep cats. | Aldous Huxley |
| A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings. | William Ralph Inge |
| The stones themselves are thick with history, and those cats that dash through the alleyways must surely be the ghosts of the famous dead in feline disguise. | Erica Jong |
| Cats are intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a purpose. | Garrison Keillor |
| Of all the things God created, from sunrises and rainbows, to black holes and humor, cats are the most fascinating to me. | Jarod Kintz |
| Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I have never heard of one who suffered from insomnia. | Joseph Wood Krutch |
| Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want. | Joseph Wood Krutch |
| I love my cats more than I love most people. Probably more than is healthy. | Amy Lee |
| No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens. | Abraham Lincoln |
| Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. | H. P. Lovecraft |
| In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. | H. P. Lovecraft |
| Cats do not have to be shown how to have a good time, for they are unfailingly ingenious in that respect. | James Mason |
| When Rome burned, the emperor's cats still expected to be fed on time. | Seanan McGuire |
| Cats have it all: admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it. | Rod McKuen |
| A meow massages the heart. | Stuart McMillan |
| Artists like cats; soldiers like dogs. | Desmond Morris |
| A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution. | Hazel Nicholson |
| You can not look at a sleeping cat and feel tense. | Jane Pauley |
| A cat will do what it wants when it wants, and there’s not a thing you can do about it. | Frank Perkins |
| The way to get on with a cat is to treat it as an equal--or even better, as the superior it knows itself to be. | Elizabeth Peters |
| I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat. | Edgar Allan Poe |
| If cats could talk, they wouldn’t. | Nan Porter |
| The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an axe-murderer. | Paula Poundstone |
| In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this. | Terry Pratchett |
| It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more. | Agnes Repplier |
| There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats. | Albert Schweitzer |
| Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. | Sir Walter Scott |
| I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream. | William Shakespeare |
| When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even. | Percy Bysshe Shelley |
| I’m not sure why I like cats so much. I mean, they’re really cute obviously. They are both wild and domestic at the same time. | Michael Showalter |
| A kitten is, in the animal world, what a rosebud is in the garden. | Robert Sowthey |
| Are cats strange animals or do they so resemble us that we find them curious as we do monkeys? | John Steinbeck |
| I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior. | Hippolyte Taine |
| I have lived with several Zen masters--all of them cats. | Eckhart Tolle |
| A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. | Mark Twain |
| If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember. | Mark Twain |
| Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat. | Mark Twain |
| In a cat's eye, all things belong to cats. | Unknown |
| It is impossible to keep a straight face in the presence of one or more kittens. | Cynthia E. Varnado |
| I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through. | Jules Verne |
| If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats. | Eugen Weber |
| The phrase ‘domestic cat’ is an oxymoron. | George Will |
|
|
|
| When a cat adopts you, there is nothing to be done about it except to put up with it until the wind changes. | T. S. Eliot |
| There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person. | Dan Greenberg |