photo of man hugging tan dogPhoto Credit: Eric Ward

If having a soul means being able to feel love and loyalty and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans.

--James Herriot

Dogs are voiceless ... a critical part of having dogs is emotional responsibility: learning how to understand them and, when necessary, to speak and act on their behalf.

--Jon Katz

Every dog has his day, unless he loses his tail, then he has a weak-end.

--June Carter Cash

It is rewarding beyond words to rescue a dog from the shelter and have that dog become part of your family.

--Jenna Morasca

A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference.

--Jean Hanff Korelitz

Dogs are here to remind us life really is a simple thing. You eat, sleep, take walks, and pee when you must. That's about all there is. They are quick to forgive trespasses and assume strangers will be kind.

--Jonathan Carroll

Dogs are the only mammals that will actually stare and look into a human's eyes.

--Jerry O'Connell

I guess you don't really own a dog, you rent them, and you have to be thankful that you had a long lease.

--Joe Garagiola

Dogs are great. Bad dogs, if you can really call them that, are perhaps the greatest of them all.

--John Grogan

It's just the most amazing thing to love a dog, isn't it? It makes our relationships with people seem as boring as a bowl of oatmeal.

--John Grogan

A dog is the greatest gift a parent can give a child. OK, a good education, then a dog.

--John Grogan

Many of the qualities that come so effortlessly to dogs -- loyalty, devotion, selflessness, unflagging optimism, unqualified love -- can be elusive to humans.

--John Grogan

The perfect rescue dog is out there for everybody. You just have to find it.

--Josh Hopkins

The fidelity of a dog is a precious gift.

--Konrad Lorenz

The bond with a true dog is as lasting as the ties of this earth will ever be.

--Konrad Lorenz

Dogs have boundless enthusiasm but no sense of shame. I should have a dog as a life coach.

--Moby

Only my dogs will not betray me.

--Maria Callas

The love of a dog is a pure thing. He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.

--Michel Houellebecq

My dogs are more important than my family.

--Mickey Rourke

The dog lives here, Pete. You're just visiting.

--Marge Schott

A dog will teach you unconditional love. If you can have that in your life, things won't be too bad.

--Robert Wagner

The dog lives for the day, the hour, even the moment.

--Robert Falcon Scott

Everyone knows dogs. Most people love dogs. I think most American families probably have a dog, but I don't think people really realize or understand just how wonderful and special dogs are.

--Robert Crais

Dogs give us something just as we give something to them.

--Robert Crais

When dogs fulfill their roles they are ecstatically happy.

--Robert Crais

No other animal bonds to a human being the way a dog does. And I suspect there is no other animal to which human beings can bond the way we can bond to a dog.

--Robert Crais

Dogs are my favorite people.

--Richard Dean Anderson

Let sleeping dogs lie.

--Robert Walpole

Longer Version:

Let sleeping dogs lie -- who wants to rouse 'em?


Most owners are at length able to teach themselves to obey their dog.

--Robert Morley

Dogs are great teachers. They are at home in the world. They live in the moment, and they force us to stay there with them. Dogs love us unconditionally, not for our bodies or bank accounts.

--Susan Cheever

No matter how you're feeling, a little dog gunna love you.

--Waka Flocka Flame

You cannot teach an old dog new tricks.

--William Camden

Dogs are us, only innocent.

--Cynthia Heimel

Dogs act exactly the way we would act if we had no shame.

--Cynthia Heimel

Never stand between a dog and the hydrant.

--John Peers

Dogs' lives are too short. Their only fault, really.

--Agnes Sligh Turnbull

If I could be half the person my dog is, I'd be twice the human I am.

--Charles Yu

Dogs are the magicians of the universe.

--Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Good dogs should never be asked to prove that they're good dogs. If there's anything in this world that we should take on faith, it's good dogs.

--Mira Grant

There is nothing truer in this world than the love of a good dog.

--Mira Grant

The poor dog, in life the firmest friend, the first to welcome, the foremost to defend.

--Lord Byron

Learn how to love others from a dog and
how to live for others from a tree.

--Luffina Lourduraj

If you have a dog, you will most likely outlive it; to get a dog is to open yourself to profound joy and, prospectively, to equally profound sadness.

--Marjorie Garber

Love me, love my dog.

--Bernard of Clairvaux

Dogs love company. They place it first on their short list of needs.

--J. R. Ackerley

A dog has one aim in life... to bestow his heart.

--J. R. Ackerley

The dog is a result of fear transformed into love.

--David Paul Kirkpatrick

When we look at a dog, we see the best in ourselves.

--David Paul Kirkpatrick

To a dog, motoring isn't just a way of getting from here to there, it's also a thrill and an adventure. The mere jingle of car keys is enough to send most any dog into a whimpering, tail-wagging frenzy.

--Jon Winokur

Properly trained, a man can be dog's best friend.

--Corey Ford

After years of having a dog, you know him. You know the meaning of his snuffs and grunts and barks. Every twitch of the ears is a question or statement, every wag of the tail is an exclamation.

--Robert R. McCammon

Dogs, for a reason that can only be described as divine, have the ability to forgive, let go of the past, and live each day joyously. It's something the rest of us strive for.

--Jennifer Skiff

Dogs never lie about love.

--Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

Dogs love us not only because we feed them, walk them, or groom them, or protect them, but because we are fun. How astonishing!

--Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson

The greatest fear dogs know is the fear that you will not come back when you go out the door without them.

--Stanley Coren

For those who love dogs, it would be the worst form of a lie to call any place where dogs were banned Paradise. Certainly no loving God would separate people from their canine friends for eternity.

--Stanley Coren

When was the last time someone was so overjoyed to see you, so brimming with love and affection that they literally ran to greet you? A dog will do that for you -- ten, twenty, thirty times a day.

--Lionel Fisher

Without a word, my dog taught me the meaning of love.

--Leila Grandemange

I'm convinced that petting a puppy is good luck.

--Meg Donohue

God turns clouds inside out to make fluffy beds for the dogs in Dog Heaven, and when they are tired from running and barking and eating ham-sandwich biscuits, the dogs find a cloud bed for sleeping. God watches over each one of them. And there are no bad dreams.

--Cynthia Rylant

You will never know loneliness when you have a dog, when you lose that dog it will be loneliness like you've never known.

--Michael P. Naughton

Thorns may hurt you, men desert you, sunlight turn to fog;
but you're never friendless ever, if you have a dog.

--Douglas Malloch

You can teach an old dog new tricks if the old dog wants to learn.

--Tip O'Neill

A plot is two dogs and one bone.

--Robert Newton Peck

A dog is grateful for what is, which I am finding to be the soundest kind of wisdom and very good theology.

--Carrie Newcomer

I love dogs more than most people I've met.

--Michelle Beadle

Dogs are miracles with paws.

--Sark

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

--Emily Dickinson

Man himself cannot express love and humility by external signs so plainly as does a dog when with drooping ears, hanging lips, flexuous body, and wagging tail, he meets his beloved master.

--Charles Darwin

Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate in their object-relations.

--Sigmund Freud

DOG: A kind of additional or subsidiary Diety designed to catch the overflow or surplus of the world's worship.

--Ambrose Bierce

Living with a dog is easy- like living with an idealist.

--H.L. Mencken

Nothing but love has made the dog lose his wild freedom, to become the servant of man.

--D.H. Lawrence

When a dog runs at you, whistle for him.

--Henry David Thoreau

God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.

--Rainer Maria Rilke

I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.

--George Bernard Shaw

The most affectionate creature in the world is a wet dog.

--Ambrose Bierce

Never tease an old dog; he might have one bite left.

--Robert A. Heinlein

Dogs wait for us faithfully.

--Cicero

The dog is man's best friend. He has a tail on one end. Up in front he has teeth. And four legs underneath.

--Ogden Nash

The dog is the most faithful of animals and would be much esteemed were it not so common. Our Lord God has made His greatest gifts the commonest.

--Martin Luther

The time to save is now. When a dog gets a bone, he doesn't go out and make a down payment on a bigger bone. He buries the one he's got.

--Will Rogers

There is honor in being a dog.

--Aristotle

Dogs are easier to love than people; they're certainly more dependable. Once they love you, that's it. A true friend in life is a dog.

--Joan Rivers

Everything I know, I learned from dogs.

--Nora Roberts

Happiness is a warm puppy.

--Charles M. Schulz

Every dog must have his day.

--Jonathan Swift

I would look at a dog and when our eyes met, I realized that the dog and all creatures are my family. They're like you and me.

--Ziggy Marley

If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.

--Woodrow Wilson

But was there ever a dog that praised his fleas?

--William Butler Yeats

In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.

--W. H Auden

Dogs laugh, but they laugh with their tails.

--Max Eastman

Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.

--Kinky Friedman

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

--Jane Goodall

Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

--Groucho Marx

When the dog looks at you, the dog is not thinking what kind of a person you are. The dog is not judging you.

--Eckhart Tolle

What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight -- it's the size of the fight in the dog.

--Dwight D. Eisenhower

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

--Caroline Knapp

There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.

--Bernard Williams

Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.

--Ann Landers
photo of man hugging tan dog

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