Cat Quotations

“‘I meant,’ said Ipslore bitterly, ‘what is there in this world that truly makes living worthwhile?’ Death thought about it. ‘Cats,’ he said eventually. ‘Cats are nice.’” ~Terry Pratchett

“A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.” ~Groucho Marx

“A cat allows you to sleep on the bed. On the edge.” ~Jenny De Vries

“A cat can be trusted to purr when she is pleased, which is more than can be said for human beings.” ~William Ralph Inge

“A cat can climb down from a tree without the assistance of the fire department or any other agency. The proof is that no one has ever seen a cat skeleton in a tree.” ~Unknown

“A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.” Ernest Hemmingway

“A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine, and the hearth in foul weather.” ~Judith Merkle Riley

“A cat is nobody’s fool.” ~Heywood Brown

“A cat is the only domestic animal I know who toilet trains itself and does a damned impressive job of it.” ~Joseph Epstein

“A cat is there when you call her – if she doesn’t have something better to do.” ~Bill Adler

“A cat isn’t fussy – just so long as you remember he likes his milk in the shallow, rose-patterned saucer and his fish on the blue plate. From which he will take it, and eat it off the floor.” ~Arthur Bridges

“A cat’s name may tell you more about its owners than it does about the cat.” ~Linda W. Lewis

“A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.” ~Barbara Holland

“A dog is like a liberal, he wants to please everybody. A cat doesn’t really need to know that everybody loves him.” ~William Kunstler

“A dog, I have always said, is prose; a cat is a poem.” ~Jean Burden

“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

“A human may go for a stroll with a cat; he has to walk a dog. The cat leads the way, running ahead, tail high, making sure you understand the arrangement. If you should happen to get ahead, the cat will never allow you to think it is following you. It will stop and clean some hard-to-reach spot, or investigate a suspicious movement in the grass; you will find yourself waiting and fidgeting like the lackey you are. But this is not annoying to cat lovers, who understand and appreciate a good joke, even when it is on them.” ~Robert Stearns

“A kitten is the delight of the household; all day long a comedy is played out by an incomparable actor.” ~Jules François Felix Fleury-Husson, under the pen name Champfleury

“A man has to work so hard so that something of his personality stays alive. A tomcat has it so easy, he has only to spray and his presence is there for years on rainy days.” ~Albert Einstein

“A rose has thorns, a cat has claws; certainly both are worth the risk.” ~Unknown

“Always the cat remains a little beyond the limits we try to set for him in our blind folly.” ~Andre Norton

“Any cat who misses a mouse pretends it was aiming for the dead leaf.” ~Charlotte Gray

“Any household with at least one feline member has no need for an alarm clock.” ~Louise A. Belcher

“As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.” ~Ellen Perry Berkeley

“Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.” ~Robertson Davies

“Because of our willingness to accept cats as superhuman creatures, they are the ideal animals with which to work creatively.” ~Roni Schotter

“Cat lovers can readily be identified. Their clothes always look old and well used. Their sheets look like bath towels and their bath towels look like a collection of knitting mistakes.” ~Eric Gurney

“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, DVM

“Cats are a mysterious kind of folk. There is more passing in their minds than we are aware of.” ~Sir Walter Scott

“Cats are a tonic, they are a laugh, they are a cuddle, they are at least pretty just about all of the time and beautiful some of the time.” ~Roger Caras

“Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance.” ~Dan Greenburg

“Cats are independent, by which I mean smart.” ~Dave Barry

“Cats are like greatness: Some people are born into cat-loving families, some achieve cats, and some have cats thrust upon them.” ~William H.A. Carr

“Cats are living adornments.” ~Edwin Lent

“Cats are magical. . .the more you pet them the longer you both live.” ~Unknown

“Cats are not impure; they keep watch about us.” ~The Prophet Mohammed

“Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.” ~Jeff Valdez”

“Cats are the ultimate narcissists. You can tell this by all the time they spend on personal grooming. Dogs aren’t like this. A dog’s idea of personal grooming is to roll in a dead fish.” ~James Gorman

“Cats can work out mathematically the exact place to sit that will cause most inconvenience.” ~Pam Brown

“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

“Cats don’t bark and act brave when they see something small in fur or feathers, they kill it. Dogs tend to bravado. They’re braggarts. In the great evolutionary drama the dog is Sergeant Bilko, the cat is Rambo.” ~James Gorman

“Cats love one so much – more than they will allow. But they have so much wisdom they keep it to themselves.” ~Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

“Cats never strike a pose that isn’t photogenic.” ~Lillian Jackson Braun

“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.” ~Joseph Wood Krutch

“Cats, like butterflies, need no excuse.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes less than themselves.” ~A. S. J. Tessimond

“Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.” ~Hector Hugh Munro, under the pan name Saki

“Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.” ~Arnold Edinborough

“Do you see that kitten chasing so prettily her own tail? If you could look with her eyes, you might see her surrounded with hundreds of figures performing complex dramas, with tragic and comic issues, long conversations, many characters, many ups and downs of fate.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later.” ~Mary Bly

“Dogs have owners, cats have staff.” ~Unknown

“Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.” ~Winston Churchill

“Essentially, you do not so much teach your cat as bribe him.” ~Lynn Hollyn

“For every house is incomplete without him, and a blessing is lacking in the spirit.” ~Christopher Smart

“God made the cat in order that man might have the pleasure of caressing the lion.” ~Fernand Mery

“He lives in the halflights in secret places, free and alone – this mysterious little great being whom his mistress calls ‘My cat’.” ~Margaret Benson

“How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“I believe cats to be spirits come to earth. A cat, I am sure, could walk on a cloud without coming through.” ~Jules Verne

“I had been told that the training procedure with cats was difficult. It’s not. Mine had me trained in two days.” ~Bill Dana

“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.” ~Hippolyte Taine

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.” ~Jean Cocteau

“I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat.” ~Edgar Allan Poe

“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

“If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then a cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.” ~Doris Lessing

“If cats could talk, they wouldn’t.” ~Nan Porter

“If toast always lands butter-side down, and cats always land on their feet, what happens if you strap toast on the back of a cat and drop it?” ~Stephen Wright.

“If we treated everyone we meet with the same affection we bestow upon our favorite cat, they, too, would purr.” ~Martin Buxbaum

“If you are worthy of its affection, a cat will be your friend, but never your slave.” ~Theophile Gautier

“If you want to be a psychological novelist and write about human beings, the best thing you can do is keep a pair of cats.” ~Aldous Huxley

“Ignorance killed the cat, sir. Curiosity was framed.” ~C.J. Cherryh

“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 that they use.” ~Mark Twain

“In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.” ~Terry Pratchett

“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

“In nine lifetimes, you’ll never know as much about your cat as your cat knows about you.” ~Michael Zullo

“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.” ~Unknown

“Intelligence in the cat is underrated.” ~Louis Wain

“It is remarkable, in cats, that the outer life they reveal to their master is one of perpetual confident boredom. All they betray of the hidden life is by means of symbol; if it were not for the recurring evidence of murder – the disemboweled rabbits, the headless flickers, the torn squirrels – we should forever imagine our cats to be simple pets whose highest ambition is to sleep in the best soft chair, whose worst crime is to sharpen their claws on carpeting.” ~Robley Wilson, Jr.

“It occurs to me that I can’t remember ever reading about a murderer who gave house room to, or was fond of, a cat.” ~P.D. James

“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

“Kittens can happen to anyone.” ~Paul Gallico

“Like a graceful vase, a cat, even when motionless, seems to flow.” ~George F. Will

“Macavity, Macavity there’s no one like Macavity / There never was a cat of such deceitfulness and suavity / He always has an alibi and one or two to spare / At whatever time the deed took place – Macavity wasn’t there!” ~TS Elliot

“Minnaloushe creeps through the grass / Alone, important and wise / And lifts to the changing moon / His changing eyes.” ~W. B. Yeats

“Most cats, when they are out want to be in, and vice versa, and often simultaneously.” ~Louis J. Camuti

“Most of us rather like our cats to have a streak of wickedness. I should not feel quite easy in the company of any cat that walked about the house with a saintly expression.” ~Beverly Nichols

“Nature abhors a vacuum, but not as much as cats do.” ~Lee Entrekin

“No tame animal has lost less of its native dignity or maintained more if its ancient reserve. The domestic cat might rebel tomorrow.” ~William Conway

“Nothing makes a house cozier than cats.” ~Gladys Taber

“Of all animals, he alone attains the contemplative life. He regards the wheel of existence from without, like the Buddha.” ~Andrew Long

“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If a man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” ~Mark Twain

“Of all the toys available, none is better designed than the owner himself. A large multipurpose plaything, its parts can be made to move in almost any direction. It comes completely assembled, and it makes a sound when you jump on it.” ~Stephen Baker

“One cat just leads to another.” ~Ernest Hemingway (who owned an enormous number of cats)

“One is never sure, watching two cats washing each other, whether it’s affection, the taste, or a trial run for the jugular.” ~Helen Thomson

“One small cat changes coming home to an empty house to coming home.” ~Pam Brown

“Only cat lovers know the luxury of fur-coated, musical hot water bottles that never go cold.” ~Susanne Millen

“People that hate cats will come back as mice in their next life.” ~Faith Resnick

“Perhaps it is because cats do not live by human patterns, do not fit themselves into prescribed behaviour, that they are so united to creative people.” ~Andre Norton

“Poets generally love cats – because poets have no delusions about their own superiority.” ~Marion Garretty

“Praise be to thee, O Ra, exalted Sekhem, thou art the Great Cat, the avenger of the gods and the judge of words and the president of the sovereign chiefs and the governor of the Holy Circle; thou art indeed the bodies of the Great Cat.” ~Inscription on the Royal Tombs at Thebes

“Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.” ~Robert Graves

“Prowling his own quiet backyard or asleep by the fire, he is still only a whisker away from the wilds.” ~Jean Burden

“Some people have cats and go on to lead normal lives.” ~Unknown

“Sometimes he sits at your feet looking into your face with an expression so gentle and caressing that the depth of his gaze startles you. Who can believe that there is no soul behind those luminous eyes!” ~Theophile Gautier

“Surely the cat, when it assumes the meatloaf position and gazes meditatively through slitted eyes, is pondering thoughts of utter profundity.” ~Mij Colson Barnum

“The cat has always been associated with the moon. Like the moon it comes to life at night, escaping from humanity and wandering over housetops with its eyes beaming out through the darkness.” ~Patricia Dale-Green

“The cat has been described as the most perfect animal, the acme of muscular perfection and the supreme example in the animal kingdom of the coordination of mind and muscle.” ~Roseanne Ambrose Brown

“The cat has too much spirit to have no heart” ~Ernest Menaul

“The cat is the only animal which accepts the comforts but rejects the bondage of domesticity.” ~Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon

“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

“The great charm of cats is their rampant egotism, their devil-may-care attitude toward responsibility, their disinclination to earn an honest dollar.” ~Robertson Davies

“The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” ~Mark Twain

“The mathematical probability of a common cat doing exactly as it pleases is the one scientific absolute in the world.” ~Lynn M. Osband

“The phrase ‘domestic cat’ is an oxymoron.” ~George F. Will

“The playful kitten with its pretty little tigerish gambole is infinitely more amusing than half the people one is obliged to live with in the world.” ~Lady Sydney Morgan

“The real measure of a day’s heat is the length of a sleeping cat.” ~Charles J. Brady

“The really great thing about cats is their endless variety. One can pick a cat to fit almost any kind of decor, color, scheme, income, personality, mood. But under the fur, whatever color it may be, there still lies, essentially unchanged, one of the world’s free souls.” ~Eric Gurney

“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” ~Leonardo da Vinci

“The smart cat doesn’t let on that he is.” ~H.G. Frommer

“The sun rose slowly, like a fiery furball coughed up uneasily onto a sky-blue carpet by a giant unseen cat.” ~Michael McGarel

“The way to keep a cat is to try to chase it away.” ~E.W. Howe

“There are few things in life more heartwarming than to be welcomed by a cat.” ~Tay Hohoff

“There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.” ~Anonymous

“There are two means of refuge from the misery of life – music and cats.” ~Albert Schweitzer

“There is no more intrepid explorer than a kitten.” ~Jules Champfleury

“There is something about the presence of a cat… that seems to take the bite out of being alone.” ~Louis J. Camuti

“There is, incidentally, no way of talking about cats that enables one to come off as a sane person.” ~Dan Greenberg

“There’s no need for a piece of sculpture in a home that has a cat.” ~Wesley Bates

“They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, ‘Can he name a kitten?’” ~Samuel Butler

“Time spent with cats is never wasted.” ~Colette

“To respect the cat is the beginning of the aesthetic sense.” ~Erasmus Darwin

“To understand a cat, you must realize that he has own gifts, his own viewpoint, even his own morality.” ~Lilian Jackson Braun

“Two cats can live as cheaply as one, and their owner has twice as much fun.” ~Lloyd Alexander

“Two things are aesthetically perfect in the world – the clock and the cat.” ~Emile Auguste Chartier

“Way down deep, we’re all motivated by the same urges. Cats have the courage to live by them.” ~Jim Davis

“We have a theory that cats are planning to take over the world, just try to look them straight in the eye…yup, they’re hiding something!” ~Dog Fancy

“What greater gift than the love of a cat?” ~Charles Dickens

“When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her?” ~Michel De Montaigne

“When I’m in the doghouse, my cats still come to visit.” ~Unknown

“With the qualities of cleanliness, affection, patience, dignity, and courage that cats have, how many of us, I ask you, would be capable of becoming cats?” ~Fernand Mery

“Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“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

“You can’t own a cat. The best you can do is be partners.” ~Henry Swanson.

“You now have learned enough to see / That cats are much like you and me / And other people whom we find / Possessed of various types of mind / For some are sane and some are mad / And some are good and some are bad / And some are better, some are worse — / But all may be described in verse.” ~T. S. Eliot

“Your cat will never threaten your popularity by barking at three in the morning. He won’t attack the mailman or eat the drapes, although he may climb the drapes to see how the room looks from the ceiling.” ~Helen Powers

“An ordinary kitten will ask more questions than any five year old.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.” ~Abraham Lincoln.

“The cat always leaves a mark on his friend.” ~Aesop

“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

“Most cats do not approach humans recklessly. The possibility of concealed weapons, clods or sticks, tend to make them reserved. Homeless cats in particular – with some justification, unfortunately – consider humans their natural enemies. Much ceremony must be observed, and a number of diplomatic feelers put out, before establishing a state of truce.” ~Lloyd Alexander

“In the middle of a world that had always been a bit mad, the cat walks with confidence.” ~Rosanne Amberson

“Places to look: behind the books in the bookshelf, any cupboard with a gap too small for any cat to squeeze through, the top of anything sheer, under anything too low for a cat to squash under and inside the piano.” Roseanne Ambrose-Brown

“Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they’re glad to see you. Rudimace always peed on our shoes.” ~W. H. Auden

“There are three basic personality factors in cats: The kind who run up when you say hello and rub against you in cheap romance; the kind who run away certain that you mean to ravish them; and the kind who just look back and don’t move a muscle. I love all three kinds.” ~Eve Babitz

“To bathe a cat takes brute force, perseverance, courage of conviction – and a cat. The last ingredient is usually the hardest to come by.” ~Stephen Baker

“Most beds sleep up to six cats. Ten cats without the owner.” ~Stephen Baker

“Cats’ hearing apparatus is built to allow the human voice to easily go in one ear and out the other.” ~Stephen Baker

“Cats are notoriously sore losers. Coming in second best, especially to someone as poorly coordinated as a human being, grates their sensibility.” ~Stephen Baker

“If I die before my cat, I want a little of my ashes put in his food so I can live inside him.” ~Drew Barrymore

“Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.” ~Charles Baudelaire

“It has been the providence of Nature to give the cat nine lives instead of one.” ~Bidpai (326 B.C.)

“I called my cat William because no shorter name fits the dignity of his character. Poor old man, he has fits now, so I call him fitz-William.” ~Josh Billings

“Cats, by means of their whiskers, seem to possess something like an additional sense: these have, perhaps, some analogy to the antennae of moths and butterflies.” ~Rev. W. Bingley

“If a cat spoke, it would say things like, ‘Hey, I don’t see the problem here’.” ~Roy Blount, Jr.

“Cats have intercepted my footsteps at the ankle for so long that my gait, both at home and on tour, has been compared to that of a man wading through low surf.” ~Roy Blount, Jr.

“I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.” ~Reginald Horace Blyth

“Cats invented self-esteem; there is not an insecure bone in their body.” ~Erma Bombeck

“Cats are creatures that express a multitude of moods and attitudes.” ~Karen Brademeyer

“At dinner time he would sit in a corner, concentrating, and suddenly they would say, ‘Time to feed the cat,’ as if it were their own idea.” ~Lilian Jackson Braun

“As we all know, cats now rule the world.” ~John R. F. Breen

“Cats have an infallible understanding of total concentration – and get between you and it.” ~Arthur Bridges

“The most domesticated of cats somehow contrives to lead an outside life of its own.” Katherine Briggs

“Cat angels are the reason there are no mice angels.” ~Mel Brooks

“One reason cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.” ~Gwendolyn Brooks

“Kittens are wide-eyed, soft and sweet. With needles in their jaws and feet.” ~Pam Brown

“The trouble with sharing one’s bed with cats is that they’d rather sleep on you than beside you.” ~Pam Brown

“I love cats. I even think we have one at home.” ~Edward L. Burlingame

“The cat does not offer services. The cat offers itself. Of course he wants care and shelter. You don’t buy love for nothing. Like all pure creatures, cats are practical.” ~William S. Burroughs

“Anyone who claims that a cat cannot give a dirty look either has never kept a cat or is singularly unobservant.” ~Maurice Burton

“Cats are our last best chance to have a dysfunctional relationship.” ~John Bush

“I must have a cat whom I find homeless, wandering about the court, and to whom, therefore, I am under no obligation. I have already selected a dirty little drunken wretch of a kitten to be the successor to my poor old cat.” ~Samuel Butler

“To err is human, to purr is feline.” ~Robert Byrne

“A cat is an example of sophistication minus civilization.” ~Author Unknown

“Civilization is defined by the presence of cats.” ~Unknown

“I want to create a cat like the real cats I see crossing the streets, not like those you see in houses. They have nothing in common. The cat of the streets has bristling fur. It runs like a fiend, and if it looks at you, you think it is going to jump in your face.” Pablo Picasso

“Perhaps a child, like a cat, is so much inside of himself that he does not see himself in the mirror.” ~Anais Nin

“There is no such thing as ‘just a cat’.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“Cat said, ‘I am not a friend, and I am not a Servant. I am the Cat who walks by himself, and I wish to come into your Cave’.” ~Rudyard Kipling

“Cats were put into the world to disprove the dogma that all things were created to serve man.” ~Paul Gray

“It is easy to understand why the rabble dislike cats. A cat is beautiful; it suggests ideas of luxury, cleanliness, voluptuous pleasures.” ~Charles Baudelaire

“The ideal of calm exists in a sitting cat.” ~Jules Reynard

“In my house lives a cat who is a curmudgeon and cantankerous, a cat who is charming and convivial, and a cat who is combative and commendable. And yet I have but one cat.” ~Dave Edwards

“Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify.” ~Esquire, “O’Donnell’s Laws of Cartoon Motion,” June 1980

“A cat has nine lives and nine souls, and it must have nine guardian angels watching over it. Which would explain why the little fellow is so smug.” ~Karen Fields-Hutton

“The clever cat eats cheese and breathes down rat holes with baited breath.” ~W. C. Fields

“It always gives me a shiver when I see a cat seeing what I can’t see.” ~Eleanor Farjeon

“People that don’t like cats haven’t met the right one yet.” ~Deborah A. Edwards

“When a cat chooses to be friendly, it’s a big deal, because a cat is picky.” ~Mike Deupree

“There are no ordinary cats.” ~Colette

“If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.” ~Mark Twain

“There is nothing in the animal world, to my mind, more delightful than grown cats at play. They are so swift and light and graceful, so subtle and designing, and yet so richly comic.” ~ T S Eliot

“You cannot look at a sleeping cat and feel tense.” ~Jane Pauley

“One reason we admire cats is for their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing, or pretend they do.” ~ Barbara Webster

“I have found my love of cats most helpful in understanding women.” ~John Simon

“Whether they be the musician cats in my band or the real cats of the world, they all got style.” ~Ray Charles

“Cats leave pawprints on our hearts.” ~Unknown

“Meow is like aloha – it can mean anything.” ~Hank Ketchum

“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 kind.” ~Cleveland Amory

“Of all domestic animals the cat is the most expressive. His face is capable of showing a wide range of expressions. His tail is a mirror of his mind. His gracefulness is surpassed only by his agility. And, along with all these, he has a sense of humor.” ~Walter Chandoha

“A cat is a puzzle for which there is no solution.” ~Hazel Nicholson

“To some blind souls all cats are much alike. To a cat lover every cat from the beginning of time has been utterly and amazingly unique.” ~ Jenny de Vries

“There are people who reshape the world by force or argument, but the cat just lies there, dozing, and the world quietly reshapes itself to suit his comfort and convenience.” ~Allen and Ivy Dodd

“People who love cats have some of the biggest hearts around.” ~Susan Easterly

“Any conditioned cat-hater can be won over by any cat who chooses to make the effort.” ~Paul Corey

“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, indeed, no single quality of the cat that man could not emulate to his advantage.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“Cats look beyond appearances – beyond species entirely, it seems – to peer into the heart.” ~Barbara L. Diamond

“The cat is above all things, a dramatist.” ~Margaret Benson

“Cats are oppressed, dogs terrify them, landladies starve them, boys stone them, everybody speaks of them with contempt. If they were human beings we could talk of their oppressors with a studied violence, add our strength to theirs, even organize the oppressed and like good politicians sell our charity for power.” ~William Butler Yeats

“The human race may be divided into people who love cats and people who hate them; the neutrals being few in numbers, and, for intellectual and moral reasons, not worth considering.” ~Agnes Repplier

“The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domestic animal.” ~Sir Compton MacKenzie

“Purring is an automatic safety valve device for dealing with happiness overflow.” ~Anonymous

“If you would know a man, observe how he treats a cat.” ~Robert A. Heinlein

“To assume a cat is asleep is a grave mistake. He can close his eyes and keep both his ears awake.” ~Aileen Fisher

“Some people say man is the most dangerous animal on the planet. Obviously those people have never met an angry cat.” ~Lillian Johnson

“Cats are endless opportunities for revelation.” ~Leslie Kapp

“If there is one spot of sun spilling onto the floor, a cat will find it and soak it up.” ~Jean Asper McIntosh

“It’s funny how dogs and cats know the inside of folks better than other folks do, isn’t it?” ~Eleanor H. Porter

“The problem with cats is that they get the exact same look on their face whether they see a moth or an axe-murderer.” ~Paula Poundstone

“She walks her chosen path by our side: but our ways are not her ways, our influence does not remotely touch her.” ~Agnes Repplier

“It is impossible for a lover of cats to banish these alert, gentle, and discriminating little friends, who give us just enough of their regard and complaisance to make us hunger for more.” ~Agnes Repplier

“The furry little buggers are just deep, deep wells you throw your emotions into.” ~Bruce Schimmel

“When a man wants to murder a tiger, it’s called sport. When the tiger wants to murder him, it’s called ferocity.” ~George Bernard Shaw

“The behaviour of men to animals and their behviour to each other bear a constant relationship.” ~Herbert Spencer

“I love cats. I love their grace and their elegance. I love their independence and their arrogance, and the way they lie and look at you, summing you up, surely to your detriment, with that unnerving, unwinking, appraising stare.” ~Joyce Stranger

“Dogs eat. Cats dine.” ~Ann Taylor

“Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an inscrutable mystery.” ~Lewis Thomas

“In Istanbul I met a man who said he knew beyond a doubt that God was a cat. I asked why he was so sure, and the man said, ‘When I pray to him, he ignores me’.” ~Lowell Thomas

“What sort of philosophers are we, who know absolutely nothing about the origin and destiny of cats?” ~Henry David Thoreau

“Cats are love on four legs.” ~Richard Torregrossa

“Could the purr be anything but contemplative?” ~Irving Townsend

“A cat is more intelligent than people believe and can be taught any crime.” ~Mark Twain

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.” ~Mark Twain

“If animals could speak the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow, but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.” ~Mark Twain

“If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again.” ~Mark Twain

“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

“Cats seldom make mistakes, and they never make the same mistake twice.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“The cat is the only animal without visible means of support who still manages to find a living in the city.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“The cat, it is well to remember, remains the friend of man because it pleases him to do so and not because he must.” ~Carl Van Vechten

“You could never accuse him of idleness, and yet he knew the secret of repose.” ~Charles Dudley Warner

“No one can have experienced to the fullest the true sense of achievement and satisfaction who has never pursued and successfully caught his tail.” ~Rosalind Welcher

“The cat, which is a solitary beast, is single minded and goes its way alone; but the dog, like his master, is confused in his mind.” ~H. G. Wells

“Recently we were discussing the possibility of making one of our cats Pope, and we decided that the fact that she was not Italian, and was female, made the third point, that she was a cat, irrelevant.” ~Katharine Whitehorn

“A cat doesn’t ‘roll’ well with a change of someone else’s making.” ~Carole Wilbourn

“In many respects, cats are more like men and woman than dogs; they have moods and their nature is complex.” ~Helen Winslow

“The trouble with cats is that they’ve got no tact.” ~P. G. Wodehouse

“You can visualize a hundred cats. Beyond that, you can’t. Two hundred, five hundred, it all looks the same.” ~Jack Wright (Guinness World record holder for the owner of the most cats at one time – 689)

“The cat could very well be man’s best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.” ~Doug Larson

“One of the problems of taking things apart and seeing how they work – supposing you’re trying to find out how a cat works – you take that cat apart to see how it works, what you’ve got in your hands is a non-working cat. The cat wasn’t a sort of clunky mechanism that was susceptible to our available tools of analysis.” ~Douglas Adams

“Since each of us is blessed with only one life, why not live it with a cat?” ~Robert Stearns

“When all candles be out, all cats be gray.” ~John Heywood

“Blessed are those who love cats, for they shall never be lonely.” ~Unknown

“If you want to know the character of a man, find out what his cat thinks of him.” ~Unknown

“If you stared deep into a cat’s eyes, you would be able to see into the world of spirits.” ~Unknown

For more animal-related entertainment, see the Fun Animal Stuff page.