10 quotes
An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
An animal may be cunning and ferocious enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
He had developed in the most wonderful way the distinctive silliness of man without losing one jot of the natural folly of a monkey.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
That these man-like creatures were in truth only bestial monsters, mere grotesque travesties of men, filled me with a vague uncertainty of their possibilities which was far worse than any definite fear.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
A strange persuasion came upon me that, save for the grossness of the line, the grotesqueness of the forms, I had here before me the whole balance of human life in miniature, the whole interplay of instinct, reason, and fate in its simplest form.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
So long as visible or audible pain turns you sick; so long as your own pains drive you; so long as pain underlies your propositions about sin, — so long, I tell you, you are an animal, thinking a little less obscurely what an animal feels.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
Most striking, perhaps, in their general appearance was the disproportion between the legs of these creatures and the length of their bodies; and yet — so relative is our idea of grace — my eye became habituated to their forms, and at last I even fell in with their persuasion that my own long thighs were ungainly.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
These creatures you have seen are animals carven and wrought into new shapes. To that, to the study of the plasticity of living forms, my life has been devoted. I have studied for years, gaining in knowledge as I go. I see you look horrified, and yet I am telling you nothing new. It all lay in the surface of practical anatomy years ago, but no one had the temerity to touch it.
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)