Man is not the prince of creatures,
But in reason; fail that, he is worse
Than horse or dog, or beast of wilderness. [ Field ]

Wine makes all sorts of creatures at table. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]

They serve God well who serve His creatures. [ Mrs. Norton ]

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate. [ Pope ]

So work the honey-bees;
Creatures, that by a rule in nature teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer's velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home.
To the tent royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-ey'd justice, with his surly hum.
Delivering over to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. [ William Shakespeare ]

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed - their present state. [ Pope ]

What poor creatures we men are, when I think of it. [ Plaut ]

Hypocrites are a sort of creatures that God never made. [ Proverb ]

The essential thing for all creatures is to be made to do right. [ John Ruskin ]

No one perfectly loves God who does not perfectly love some of his creatures. [ Marguerite de Valois ]

Philanthropy is the refuge of people who wish to annoy their fellow-creatures. [ Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband ]

Women, cats, and birds are the creatures that waste the most time on their toilets. [ Charles Nodier ]

Men resemble the gods in nothing so much as in doing good to their fellow creatures. [ Cicero ]

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth unseen, both when we sleep and when we wake. [ Milton ]

So work the honey-bees, creatures that by a rule in nature teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom. [ William Shakespeare ]

What women would do if they could not cry, nobody knows. What poor defenceless creatures they would be! [ Douglas Jerrold ]

To be rational is so glorious a thing that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title. [ Locke ]

The god of this world is riches, pleasure and pride, wherewith it abuses all the creatures and gifts of God. [ Luther ]

As the births of living creatures at first are ill-shapen, so are all innovations, which are the births of time. [ Bacon ]

Since love teaches how to trick the tricksters, how much reason have we to fear it - we who are poor simple creatures! [ Marguerite de Valois ]

Though you had the wisdom of Newton or the wit of Swift, garrulousness would lower you in the eyes of your fellow-creatures. [ Burns ]

God hath given to mankind a common library, His creatures; to every man a proper book, himself being an abridgment of all others. [ T. Fuller ]

Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter. [ Benjamin Disraeli ]

I think people tend to forget that trees are living creatures. They're sort of like dogs. Huge, quiet, motionless dogs, with bark instead of fur. [ Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ]

Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before and after; the more surprising that we do not look around a little, and see what is passing under our very eyes. [ Carlyle ]

To cultivate sympathy you must be among living creatures, and thinking about them; and to cultivate admiration, you must be among beautiful things and looking at them. [ Ruskin ]

Their avenging God! rancorous torturer who burns his creatures in slow fire! When they tell me that God made himself a man, I prefer to recognize a man who made himself a god. [ A. de Musset ]

Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain, - proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate. [ Leigh Hunt ]

Simple creatures, whose thoughts are not taken up, like those of educated people, with the care of a great museum of dead phrases, are very quick to see the live facts which are going on about them. [ Holmes ]

O, if the deeds of human creatures could be traced to their source, how beautiful would even death appear; for how much charity, mercy, and purified affection would be seen to have their growth in dusty graves! [ Dickens ]

Dreams are the bright creatures of poem and legend, who sport on the earth in the night season, and melt away with the first beam of the sun, which lights grim care and stern reality on their daily pilgrimage through the world. [ Dickens ]

Now, my young friends to whom I am addressing myself, with reference to this habit of reading, I make bold to tell you that it is your pass to the greatest, the purest, and the most perfect pleasure that God has prepared for His creatures. [ Anthony Trollope ]

It is quite deplorable to see how many rational creatures, or at least who are thought so, mistake suffering for sanctity, and think a sad face and a gloomy habit of mind propitious offerings to that Deity whose works are all light and lustre and harmony and loveliness. [ Lady Morgan ]

Love to make others happy; yes, surely at all times, so far as you can. But at bottom that is not the aim of any life. Do not think that your life means a mere searching in gutters for fallen creatures to wipe and set up.... In our life there is no meaning at all except the work we have done. [ Carlyle ]

Wherein is it possible for us, wicked and impious creatures, to be justified, except in the only Son of God? O sweet reconciliation! O untraceable ministry! O unlooked-for blessing! that the wickedness of many should be hidden in one godly and righteous man, and the righteousness of one justify a host of sinners! [ Justin Martyr ]

Though no participator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions of the tenderness due to dumb creatures, in the tranquil cruelty of angling. I can only palliate the wanton destructiveness of my amusement by trying to assure myself that my pleasure does not spring from the success of the treachery I practice toward a poor little fish, but rather from that innocent revelry in the luxuriance of summer life which only anglers enjoy to the utmost. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]