Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked.

The fox knows many tricks,
the hedgehog only one. A good one.

Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect — the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours — and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.

I am I because my little dog knows me.

America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.

Dogs are better than human beings because they know but do not tell.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Nobody kicks a dead dog

I have seen their humor and anger expressed in natural terms and learned more about them as dogs and not just extensions of human training.

Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.

I am I because my little dog knows me. That does not prove anything about [me] it only proves something about the dog.

Does a wolf know how beautiful she is when she leaps? Does a feline know what beautiful shapes she makes when she sits? Is a bird awed by the sound it hears when it snaps open its wings? Learning from them, we just act in our own true way and do not draw back from or hide our natural beauty. Like the creatures, we just are, and it is right.

You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.