Cats

"I think all cats are wild. They only act tame if there's a saucer of milk in it for them."

"If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, you end up with a non-working cat. Do not try this."

"Nothing divided people more deeply than how they felt about cats."

"A cat which dares to scratch me while we're at peace, no matter how many times it may then caress me, shall never be allowed to be close enough to me to scratch me again."

"The cat is, above all things, a dramatist; its life is lived in an endless romance though the drama is played out on quite another stage than our own, and we only enter into it as subordinate characters, as stage managers, or rather stage carpenters."

"CAT, n. A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle."

"I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature. I am, unluckily, one of those who have an antipathy to a cat, so that I am uneasy when in the room with one; and I own, I frequently suffered a good deal from the presence of this same Hodge. I recollect him one day scrambling up Dr. Johnson's breast, apparently with much satisfaction, while my friend smiling and half-whistling, rubbed down his back, and pulled him by the tail; and when I observed he was a fine cat, saying, "why yes, Sir, but I have had cats whom I liked better than this;" and then, as if perceiving Hodge to be out of countenance, adding, "but he is a very fine cat, a very fine cat indeed.""

"... in 2007 ... a study of the DNA of the entire cat family—the —revealed that it was composed of eight district groups or s. These groups diverged from their common ancestor, the catlike , at different times, beginning with the ' lineage (containing, among others, lions and tigers) over ten million years ago. The very last group to branch off the family tree, around 3.4 million years ago, was a lineage containing various species of small wildcat—the ' lineage. From genetic comparisons within the study, researchers found that the domestic cat fit within this lineage. ... In a huge project comparing genetic material from some 979 domesitc cats and wildcats, Driscoll and his colleagues discovered that all of today's domestic cats are descended from the ."

"Lat take a cat, and fostre hym wel with milk And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk, And lat hym seen a mous go by the wal, Anon he weyveth milk and flessh and al, And every deyntee that is in that hous, Swich appetit hath he to ete a mous."

"Cats don't have friends. They have co-conspirators."

"A cat is the ideal literary companion. A wife, I am sure, cannot compare except to her disadvantage. A dog is out of the question. It may do at a butcher's – it would be out of place in a bookseller's. A cat for a bookseller is a different creature temperamentally from the same animal at a fishmonger's or a baker's. In these shops the cat is a useful animal – I suppose it is employed to eat fish entrails or to keep down rats and mice – but in my shop its function is that of a familiar. It is at once decorative – contemplative – philosophical, and it begets in me great calm and contentment."

"Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons."

"Perhaps God made cats so that man might have the pleasure of fondling the tiger..."

"The kitten has a luxurious, Bohemian, unpuritanical nature. It eats six meals a day, plays furiously with a toy mouse and a piece of rope, and suddenly falls into a deep sleep whenever the fit takes it. It never feels the necessity to do anything to justify its existence; it does not want to be a Good Citizen; it has never heard of Service. It knows that it is beautiful and delightful, and it considers that a sufficient contribution to the general good. And in return for its beauty and charm it expects fish, meat, and vegetables, a comfortable bed, a chair by the grate fire, and endless petting."

"Cats — by day the most docile of God's creatures, every one of them in the night enlisting under the devil's banner — took the place by storm after the human voice had ceased."

"In Greenville, South Carolina, I had the honor of knowing a magnificent tom, weighing eight pounds, who opened doors by leaping up, seizing the knob forcibly between his fore-paws, and turning it, his only defect in the matter being that he could not close the door after him. Some years ago a family residing in New Haven, Connecticut, was alarmed by what the servants supposed to be a ghost, and the lady of the house, a thief. An outside door was repeatedly opened, no one entering but the cat. In spite of watching, nobody was discovered, and the mystery grew to be frightful. At last the ghost was caught, and it proved to be pussy. She had observed, she had reflected, she had drawn an inference; in other words, she had performed three distinct intellectual operations. The result was that she knew how to open doors by leaping up to the latch and pressing her paw on the thumb-piece."

"Confound the cats! All cats—alway— Cats of all colours, black, white, grey; By night a nuisance and by day— Confound the cats!"

"The Naming of cats is a difficult matter; It isn't just one of your holiday games. You may think at first, I'm as mad as a hatter When I tell you a cat must have three different names."

"Nothing's more playful than a young cat, nor more grave than an old one."

"All cats can see futures, and see echoes of the past. We can watch the passage of creatures from the infinity of now, from all the worlds like ours, only fractionally different. And we follow them with our eyes, ghost things, and the humans see nothing."

"If enough of us dream, if a bare thousand of us dream, we can change the world. We can dream it anew! A world in which no cat suffers from the malice of humans. In which no cats are killed by human caprice. A world that we rule."

"Dream the world. Not this pallid shadow of reality. Dream the world the way it truly is. A world in which all cats are queens and kings of creation. That is my message. And I shall keep moving, keep repeating it, until I die. Or until a thousand cats hear my words, and believe them, and dream, and we come again to paradise."

"Little one, I would like to see anyone — prophet, king or God — persuade a thousand cats to do anything at the same time."

"Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat."

"How we behave toward cats here below determines our status in heaven."

"One cat just leads to another."

"As one of the poets has said, no cat ever gave anyone a straight answer."

"Daylong this tomcat lies stretched flat As an old rough mat, no mouth and no eyes, Continual wars and wives are what Have tattered his ears and battered his head."

"Tous les chats sont mortels. Socrate est mortel. Donc Socrate est un chat."

"Although most cat owners believe that cats have a need to roam outdoors and that this activity benefits their welfare, roaming also carries welfare risks for the cat. On the other hand, most cats have not been selectively bred to be “s” that live indoors 24 hours a day. Until recently, most domestic cats were allowed to roam freely, and they contributed to the large population of stray and feral cats. In turn many pet cats come from the stray and shelter population. A large proportion of domestic cats have not been selected for easy adaptation to live in confinement and in close contact with people, and socialization to people may also not have been complete in these cats. However, cats are adaptable to a wide range of environments and are generally not known to show clear behavioral signs of problems, such as stereotypic behavior. Problem are often not abnormal behaviors per se but natural behaviors that need to be redirected to appropriate substrates. The most frequent behavior problems cited by cat owners are: inappropriate elimination, scratching, aggression, anxiety, eating problems, vocalizations, and excessive activity. Despite the frequent reporting of these behaviors, most cats will generally adapt to indoor housing provided there is sufficient space and that they are accustomed to these conditions from an early age. The , developed to assess the welfare of s in intensive systems, can be modified to assess the welfare of cats housed in confinement."

"Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want."

"Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many different ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia."

"... I think ... of a young cat I once introduced to the joys of catnip. He took only the preoccupied, casual, dutiful sniff which was the routine response to any new object presented to his attention before he started to walk away. Then he did what is called in the slang of the theater "a double take." He stopped dead in his tracks; he turned incredulously back and inhaled a good noseful. Incredulity was swallowed up in delight. Can such things be? Indubitably they can. He flung himself down and he wallowed."

"I like a cat because it does not disguise its selfishness with any flattering hypocrisies. Its attachment is not to yourself, but to your house. Let it but have food, and a warm lair among the embers, and it heeds not at whose expense. Then it has the spirit to resent aggression. You shall beat your dog, and he will fawn upon you; but a cat never forgives : it has no tender mercies, and it torments before it destroys its prey."

"It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten."

"We own a dog — he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat — he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there. It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a cat."

"The cat is a wild animal that inhabits the homes of humans."

"Yes, it is strange that anyone should dislike cats. But cats themselves are the worst offenders in this respect. They very seldom seem to like one another."

"What I like about cats is the way they ignore you. There's no telling what way they feel. If I want to be popular all I have to do is rattle the tin opener and he's all over me, purring and sharpening his back on my shins."

"Quand je me joue à ma chatte, qui sait si elle passe son temps de moi plus que je ne fais d'elle? Nous nous entretons de singeries réciproques. Si j'ay mon heure de commencer ou de refuser, aussi a elle la sienne. (translation) When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not merely a pastime to her? We entertain each other with reciprocal antics. If I have the option to commence or refuse playing, she also has her own option."

"The idea, to a cat, that somebody else owns him is ludicrous."

"The cat does not merely experience contentment, he exudes it. You cannot be in the presence of a contented cat and not have some of that contentment rub off on you. Which surely is a good part of the reason we love cats so."

"Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked."

"Many people feel more complete with a cat in their life, and I would not be surprised if cats felt the same way about us. I know that if I disappeared from the lives of my five cats, they would not be as happy as before. I know, because they wait for me to go on walks along the beach, though they could perfectly well go on their own. When I am with them, they react in such a strong way, gamboling, racing ahead of me, and then flopping down in my path, that it is obvious they derive great pleasure from my company. I find it hard to believe, though, that they could possibly enjoy my company as much as I enjoy theirs. This is not surprising: we domesticated cats for our benefit. While they get something from it, we probably got the better deal."

"In mid-nineteenth-century London, which had a population upward of two million people, the journalist and social researcher set out to survey the lives of the working and nonworking poor. One of the now obsolete categories of labor he investigated was that of the cats’-meat men: sellers of boiled , who purchased their stinking wares from knackers’ yards, then wheeled it in barrows along appointed routes each day, selling it to the public as at two and a half pence per pound. By Mayhew’s reckoning, there were a thousand such venders in the capital, serving the needs of a feline population of three hundred thousand: roughly one cat per dwelling house. Cats had a liminal status, perceived by the humans they lived alongside as being somewhere between regulators of vermin—they helped control the population of s and that flourished among the goods brought in and out of London’s teeming docks—and vermin themselves. Weasel-faced and rat-tailed, given to screeching and swiping, the mid-­century cat was a rogue scavenger and a fit target for the cruelty of children, thanks to its own well-known predisposition to cruelty. At the same time, however, a new cat was beginning to emerge. This was a round-faced, wide-eyed, sleek-­bodied creature that was pampered, primped, and lavished with affection—like Oliver, a plump, stately, black domestic cat who was a member of a suburban household in the late nineteenth century and who, preserved in taxidermied condition with a yellow ribbon tied in a bow around his neck, is now in the collection of the Museum of London."

"I have no faith in cats: they are a cold-blooded race; they are the politicians among domestic animals; they care little who is master, or what are the over-turnings, so their pickings are secure; and what are their midnight caucuses but primary meetings?"

"Tout ce qui s'agite devient pour eux un objet de badinage. Ils croyent que la nature ne s'occupe que de leur divertissement."

"Quand je me joue á ma chatte, qui sçait si elle passe son temps de moy plus que je ne fay d'elle."

"[My cat] Nameless and I have an agreement: I leave her alone and don't make sudden moves when I wake up to find her perched on my chest, staring with an unblinking hostile gaze at my face and in return she rarely mutilates me."

"Don't want a cat Scratching its claws all over my Habitat Giving no love and getting fat Oh, you can get lonely And a cat's no help with that."

"... In Wales the cat was held in great estimation. It was enacted by , "the Good," that the price of a kitten before it could see was to be a penny; if it caught a mouse, its value was raised to twopence, and afterwards to fourpence. If any one stole or killed a cat that guarded the prince's , the offender was compelled either to forfeit a ewe, or as much wheat as would cover the cat when suspended by its tail."

"It has been the providence of Nature to give this creature nine lives instead of one."

"In ancient times cats were worshiped as gods; they have not forgotten this."

"It is widely grokked that cats have the hacker nature."

"Le chat ne nous caresse pas, il se caresse à nous."

"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."

"And when [a cat's] shifts and clever managings have not sufficed to stave off inexorable fate, when its enemies have proved too strong or too many for its defensive powers, it dies fighting to the last, quivering with the choking rage or mastered resistance, and voicing in its death-yell that agony of bitter remonstrance which human animals, too, have flung at the powers that may be; the last protest against a destiny that might have made them happy—and has not. -- "The Achievement of the Cat""

"“Would you like to go and see if cook has got your dinner ready?” suggested Lady Blemley hurriedly, affecting to ignore the fact that it wanted at least two hours to Tobermory’s dinner-time."

"“Thanks,” said Tobermory, “not quite so soon after my tea. I don’t want to die of indigestion.”"

"“Cats have nine lives, you know,” said Sir Wilfred heartily."

"“Possibly,” answered Tobermory; “but only one liver.”"

"For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness."

"I cannot agree that it should be the declared public policy of Illinois that a cat visiting a neighbor’s yard or crossing the highways is a public nuisance. It is in the nature of cats to do a certain amount of unescorted roaming."

"Moreover, cats perform useful service, particularly in rural areas, in combating rodents — work they necessarily perform alone and without regard for property lines."

"J'ai beaucoup étudié les philosophes et les chats. La sagesse des chats est infiniment supérieure."

"Cats, no less liquid than their shadows, Offer no angles to the wind. They slip, diminished, neat, through loopholes Less than themselves."

"When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there — in sunny weather — stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. Then that house was complete, and its contentment and peace were made manifest to the world by this symbol, whose testimony is infallible. 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 title?"

"Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat."

"When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction."

"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."

"... a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful."

"A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime."

"We loitering in the garden—from her post Of purview at a window, languidly A great Angora watched his Collieship […] She seemed the Orient Spirit incarnate, lost In contemplation of the Western Soul!"

"A cat may look at a king."

"Lauk! what a monstrous tail our cat has got!"

"Mrs. Crupp had indignantly assured him that there wasn't room to swing a cat there; but as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on the foot of the bed, nursing his leg. "You know, Trotwood, I don't want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore what does that signify to me!""

"The Cat in Gloves catches no Mice."

"The cat would eat fish, and would not wet her feet."