• "No heaven will not ever Heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me." ~ Anonymous
• "To err is human, to purr, feline." ~ Robert Byrne
• "There's no need for a piece of sculpture in a home that has a cat." ~ Wesley Bates
• "Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!" ~ Theophile Gautier
• "The Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him." ~ Rudyard Kipling
• "In the beginning, God created man, but seeing him so feeble, He gave him the cat." ~ Warren Eckstein
• "If a dog jumps in your lap, it is because he is fond of you; but if a cat does the same thing, it is because you lap is warmer." ~ Alfred North Whitehead
• "When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her." ~ Montaigne
• "An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language." ~ Martin Buber
• "In a cat's eyes, all things belong to cats." ~ English Proverb
• "It is a very inconvenient habit of kittens that what ever you say to them, they always purr." ~ Lewis Carroll
• "If a cat does something, we call it instinct; if we do the same thing, for the same reason, we call it intelligence." ~ Will Cuppy
• "The last thing I would accuse a cat of is innocence." ~ Edward Paley (1786-1847)
• "A cat's eyes are windows enabling us to see into another world." ~ Irish Legend
• "The smallest feline is a masterpiece." ~ Leonardo da Vinci
• "If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat." ~ Mark Twain
• "Nothing's more playful than a young cat, nor more grave than an old one." ~ Thomas Fuller
• "If a cat did not put a firm paw down now and then, how could his human remain possessed." ~ Winifred Carriere
• "How you behave toward cats here below determines your status in Heaven." ~ Robert A. Heinlein
• "Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of." ~ Sir Walter Scott
• "Cats know how to obtain food without labor, shelter without confinement and love without penalties." ~ W. L. George
• "As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind." ~ Cleveland Amory (The Cat Who Came For Christmas)
• "The cat seldom interferes with other people's rights. His intelligence keeps him from doing many of the fool things that complicate life." ~ Carl Van Vechten
• "There is no more intrepid explorer than a kitten." ~ Jules Champfleury
• "Cats love one so much - more than they will allow. But they have so much wisdom they keep it to themselves." ~ Mary Wilkins
• "Even overweight, cats instinctively know the cardinal rule: when fat, arrange yourself in slim poses." ~ John Weitz
• "A cat is there when you call her - if she doesn't have anything better to do." ~ Bill Adler
• "No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens." ~ Abraham Lincoln
• "I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being." ~ Abraham Lincoln
• "Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use." ~ Mark Twain
• "A home without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat, may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove its title?" ~ Mark Twain
• "If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then a cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air." ~ Doris Lessing
• "Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this." ~ Anonymous
• "Cats are smarter than dogs. You can't get eight cats to pull a sled through snow." ~ Jeff Valdez
• "There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats." ~ Anonymous
• "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats." ~ Albert Schweitzer
• "Managing senior programmers is like herding cats." ~ Dave Platt
• "Time spent with cats is never wasted." ~ Colette
• "The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat." ~ Jules Reynard
• "Two things are aesthetically perfect in the world - the clock and the cat." ~ Emile Auguste Chartier
• "I've met many thinkers and many cats, but the wisdom of cats is infinitely superior." ~ Hippolyte Taine
• "A cat can purr its way out of anything." ~ Donna McCrohan
• "I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible." ~ R.H. Blyth, from Zen and Zen Classics V4
• "As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat." ~ Ellen Perry Berkeley
• "Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want." ~ Joseph Wood Krutch
• "You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats." ~ Colonial American proverb
• "Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later." ~ Mary Bly
• "One cat just leads to another." ~ Ernest Hemingway
• "The cat has too much spirit to have no heart." ~ Ernest Menaul
• "Dogs believe they are human. Cats believe they are God." ~ Unknown
• "Cats are glorious creatures who must on no accounts be underestimated... Their eyes are fathomless depths of cat-world mysteries." ~ Lesley Anne Ivory (from Glorious Cats, The Paintings of Lesley Anne Ivory)
• "To bathe a cat requires brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction... and a cat. The last ingredient is the hardest to come by." ~ Stephen Baker
• "Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives." ~ Albert Schweitzer
• "If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." ~ St. Francis of Assisi
• "God made the cat in order to give man the pleasure of caressing the tiger." ~ Unknown
• "The mathematical probability of a common cat doing exactly as it pleases is the one scientific absolute in the world." ~ Lynn M. Osband
• "Meow is like aloha - it can mean anything." ~ Hank Ketchum
• "Kittens are born with their eyes shut. They open them in about six days, take a look around, then close them again for the better part of their lives." ~ Stephen Baker
• "A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not." ~ Ernest Hemingway
• "There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat." ~ Tay Hohoff
• "Way down deep, we're all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them." ~ Jim Davis
• "Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly." ~ Andre Norton
• "A cat doesn't know what it wants and wants more of it." ~ Richard Hexem
• "For me, one of the pleasures of cats' company is their devotion to bodily comfort." ~ Sir Compton Mackenzie
• "It was not I who was teaching my cat to gather rosebuds, but she who was teaching me." ~ Irving Townsend
• "I saw the most beautiful cat today. It was sitting by the side of the road, its two front feet neatly and graciously together. Then it gravely swished around its tail to completely encircle itself. It was so fit and beautifully neat, that gesture, and so self-satisfied, so complacent." ~ Ann Morrow Lindbergher
• "People who love cats have some of the biggest hearts around." ~ Susan Easterly
• "Is it yet another survival of jungle instinct, this hiding away from prying eyes at important times? Or merely a gesture of independence, a challenge to man and his stupid ways?" ~ Michael Joseph
• "When your cat rubs the side of its face along your leg, it's affectionately marking you with its scent, identifying you as its private property, saying, in effect, 'You belong to me'." ~ Susan McDonough, D.M.V.
• "Cats do care. For example, they know instinctively what time we have to be at work in the morning; and they wake us up twenty minutes before the alarm goes off." ~ Michael Nelson
• "Although all cat games have their rules and rituals, these vary with the individual player. The cat, of course, never breaks a rule. If it does not follow precedent, that simply means it has created a new rule and it is up to you to learn it quickly if you want the game to continue." ~ Sidney Denham
• "I rarely meddled in the cat's personal affairs and she rarely meddled in mine. Neither of us was foolish enough to attribute human emotions to our pets." ~ Kinky Friedman
• "Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance." ~ Dan Greenburg
• "Cats are successful underachievers. They only need to purr in order to get free food and TLC. What other creature can lay around the house doing nothing beyond purring, and still get free food and TLC?" ~ Jim Aites
• "Could the purr be anything but contemplative?" ~ Irving Townsend
• "Cat people are different to the extent that they generally are not conformists. How could they be with a cat running their lives?" ~ Louis J. Camuti, D.V.M.
• "Sleeping together is a euphemism for people, but tantamount to marriage with cats." ~ Marge Percy
• "Any conditioned cat-hater can be won over by any cat who chooses to make the effort." ~ Paul Corey
• "You can tell your cat anything and he'll still love you. If you lose your job or your best friend, your cat will think no less of you." ~ Helen Powers
• "Cats are much like they were when they were first domesticated. They are very independent because they had to be to survive." ~ Dr. Raymond Hampton
• "Cats are connoisseurs of comfort." ~ James Herriot
• "A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings." ~ William Ralph Inge
• "Cats come and go without ever leaving." ~ Martha Curtis
• "The way to keep a cat is to try to chase it away." ~ E. W. Howe
• "Are cats lazy? Well, more power to them if they are. Which one of us has not entertained the dream of doing just as he likes, when and how he likes, and as much as he likes?" ~ Fernand Mery
• "A little drowsing cat is an image of perfect beatitude." ~ Jules Champfleury
• "He seems the incarnation of everything soft and silky and velvety, without a sharp edge in his composition, a dreamer whose philosophy is sleep and let sleep." ~ Saki
• "All cats are possessed of a proud spirit, and the surest way to forfeit the esteem of a cat is to treat him as an inferior being." ~ Michael Joseph
• "There is no such thing as 'just a cat'." ~ Robert A. Heinlein
• "There is, indeed, no single quality of the cat that man could not emulate to his advantage." ~ Carl Van Vechten
• Even if you have just destroyed a Ming Vase, purr. Usually all will be forgiven." ~ Lenny Rubenstein
• "We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there, lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." ~ Mark Twain
• "If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knee and follow the comings and goings of my pen -- sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved." ~ Pierre Loti
• "A cat is nobody's fool." ~ Heywood Brown
• "The reason cats climb is so that they can look down on almost every other animal...it's also the reason they hate birds." ~ K.C. Buffington
• "When I raise a cat from kittenhood, it learns to read me so well that it can con me and predict what I'm going to do. A young adult cat doesn't know what to expect from me and I don't know what to expect from it, so we immediately have each other's attention." ~ Karl Lewis Miller
AROUND THE WORLD... with tigers. • "Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank Him for not having given it wings." ~ African Proverb • "Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important." ~ Korean Proverb • "He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount." ~ Traditional Proverb • "A tiger does not have to proclaim its tigritude." ~ Nigerian Proverb
