Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson Quotes

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

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Us versus them is not in our genes. It is something we learn.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Swimming the ocean a giant brain watches us.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

We are not encouraged, on a daily basis, to pay careful attention to the animals we eat. On the contrary, the meat, dairy, and egg industries all actively encourage us to give thought to our own immediate interest (taste, for example, or cheap food) but not to the real suffering involved. They do so by deliberately withholding information and by cynically presenting us with idealized images of happy animals in beautiful landscapes, scenes of bucolic happiness that do not correspond to anything in the real world. The animals involved suffer agony because of our ignorance. The least we owe them is to lessen that ignorance.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Farmers today keep themselves in ignorance of the needs and true nature of pigs precisely because to know would put their conscience in a terrible bind. Wilful ignorance of this kind is no better than complicity.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

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.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

(about cats) They also resist our calls to come, to move, to obey, to present themselves, to do all the things that dogs do so easily. This drives some people crazy. Cats do not even care what drives us crazy!

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

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

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.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Then in a great crash they threw themselves to the floor, ears flopped down, the whites of their eyes showing, looking the way only a dog can look who is totally disappointed. Indeed, they were the very pictures of disappointment.

~ Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson