“Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love. Love the animals: God has given them the rudiments of thought and untroubled joy. So do not trouble it, do not harass them, do not deprive them of their joy, do not go against God’s intent. Man, do not exalt yourself above the animals: they are without sin, while you in your majesty defile the earth by your appearance on it, and you leave the traces of your defilement behind you — alas, this is true of almost every one of us!” — Dostoyevsky

“Compassion for animals is so closely tied to goodness that I dare say that a person who’s cruel to animals cannot be a good person.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” — Henry Bergson

“Because of the false notion that our relations with animals have no moral significance or, to put it in terms of conventional morals, we have no obligations to animals, outrageous brutality and barbarity is perpetrated.” — Arthur Schopenhauer

“He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men.” — Immanuel Kant

“You must treat animals as well as people the way you’d like to be treated.” — Leo Tolstoy

What makes humans and animals different is the causal structures (“karmic seeds”, in Yogācāra terms) of transcendental subjectivity which constitute/project the streams of our phenomenal experiences, including, firstof all, our empirical subjects, e.g., our phenomenal bodies. Like humans, animals are self-objectifications of transcendental subjects ontologically indentical with our own transcendental subjects rooted in Transcendence. They are our brothers and sisters in God.