Top 50 Sy Montgomery Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Volumes of history written in the ancient alphabet of G and C, A and T.”

— Sy Montgomery

2. “But what is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is the fingerprint of God.”

— Sy Montgomery

3. “In his classic The Outermost House, American naturalist Henry Beston writes that animals “are not brethren, they are not underlings” but beings “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are, he writes, “other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

— Sy Montgomery

4. “Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.”

— Sy Montgomery

5. “The word compassion means “with suffering.” To have compassion is to willingly join in suffering – to show those you love that you will not let them suffer.”

— Sy Montgomery

6. “Love is not changed by death,” read the quote by British poet Edith Sitwell, “and nothing is lost, and in the end, all is harvest.”

— Sy Montgomery

7. “I wonder: Can a brainless animal feel curiosity? Does it want to play? Or does it only “want” toys or food the way a plant “wants” the sun? Does a sea star experience consciousness? If it does, what does consciousness feel like to a sea star? Clearly, I have entered a world I cannot.”

— Sy Montgomery

8. “Just about every animal,” Scott says – not just mammals and birds – “can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once you find the right way to work with an animal, be it an octopus or an anaconda, together, you can accomplish what even Saint Francis might have considered a miracle.”

— Sy Montgomery

9. “Here is an animal with venom like a snake, a beak like a parrot, and ink like an old-fashioned pen. It can weigh as much as a man and stretch as long as a car, yet it can pour its baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. It can change color and shape. It can taste with its skin. Most fascinating of all, I had read that octopuses are smart.”

— Sy Montgomery

10. “I am still learning how to be a good creature. Though I try earnestly, I often fail. But I am having a great life trying...”

— Sy Montgomery

11. “If you took the monsters’ point of view, everything they did made perfect sense. The trick was learning to think like a monster.”

— Sy Montgomery

12. “The Buddha denied the existence of persisting selves. At the end of life, the self may dissolve into eternity like salt in the ocean. To some, this might seem distressing. But to lose the lonely self in the ocean of eternity could also be a release, an enlightenment, as the mystics promise.”

— Sy Montgomery

13. “A giant Pacific octopus – the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species – can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big problem for both the octopus and the aquarium.”

— Sy Montgomery

14. “For more than a year and a half, since meeting Athena, since coming to know Octavia and now Kali, each time I’ve reached into the tanks where we have brought these creatures into our world, I’ve longed to enter theirs. At last, in the warm embrace of the sea, breathing underwater, surrounded by the octopus’s liquid world, my breath rising in silver bubbles like a song of praise, here I am.”

— Sy Montgomery

15. “Being friends with an octopus-whatever that friendship meant to her-has shown me that our world, and the worlds around and within it, is aflame with shades of brilliance we cannot fathom.”

— Sy Montgomery

16. “A lion is a mammal like us; an octopus is put together completely differently, with three hearts, a brain that wraps around its throat, and a covering of slime instead of hair. Even their blood is a different color from ours; it’s blue, because copper, not iron, carries its oxygen.”

— Sy Montgomery

17. “The ability to ascribe thoughts to others, thoughts that might differ from our own, is a sophisticated cognitive skill, known as “theory of mind.”

— Sy Montgomery

18. “Isn’t this what we want to know about those whom we care about? What is it like, we wonder at each meeting, in shared meals and secrets and silences, with each touch and glance, to be you?”

— Sy Montgomery

19. “A far worse mistake than misreading an animal’s emotions is to assume the animal hasn’t any emotions at all.”

— Sy Montgomery

20. “The bliss of stroking an octopus’s head is difficult to convey to most people, even to animal lovers.”

— Sy Montgomery

21. “Octopus slime is sort of a cross between drool and snot. But in a nice way. And it’s very useful. It helps to be slippery if you’re squeezing your body in and out of tight places. Slime keeps the octopus moist if it wants to emerge from the water, which some species of octopus do with surprisingly frequency in the wild.”

— Sy Montgomery

22. “Normally a prolonged stare from a gorilla is a threat. But Digit’s gaze bore no aggression. He seemed to say: I know. Dian would later write that she believed Digit understood she was sick.”

— Sy Montgomery

23. “At the Seattle Aquarium, Sammy the giant Pacific octopus enjoyed playing with a baseball-size plastic ball that could be screwed together by twisting the two halves. A staffer put food inside the ball but later was surprised to find that not only had the octopus opened the ball, it had screwed it back together when it was done.”

— Sy Montgomery

24. “Karma is choice.”

— Sy Montgomery

25. “There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one – which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind. How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin.”

— Sy Montgomery

26. “Adult gorillas will fight to the death defending their families. This is why poachers who may be seeking only one infant for the zoo trade must often kill all the adults in the family to capture the baby.”

— Sy Montgomery

27. “Just about every animal,” Scott says – not just mammals and birds – “can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.”

— Sy Montgomery

28. “As with a child, to commune with Athena demands a level of openness and intuition greater than that used in the usual discourse between adult humans of a common culture.”

— Sy Montgomery

29. “Love is the highest and best use of a life.”

— Sy Montgomery

30. “Knowing someone who belongs to another species can enlarge your soul in surprising ways.”

— Sy Montgomery

31. “Unlike the supply of dogs, the supply of good names isn’t limitless.”

— Sy Montgomery

32. “But I am also aware that in animals, as well as people, there is an inborn temperament, a way of seeing the world, that interacts with the environment, and that shapes personality. There’s nobody else doing what I’m doing. It may be weird, but it’s unique.”

— Sy Montgomery

33. “Our kind has surely accomplished brilliant feats during our short time on this earth as a species. But before we poison, pollute, degrade and murder every other creature on the planet, we must learn to limit our numbers and our greed. This is the lesson that humans so desperately need to learn at this turning point in human history.”

— Sy Montgomery

34. “Always somewhere there is fire or smoke, insistent reminders of the greed consuming the world.”

— Sy Montgomery

35. “Had a person attempted to taste me so soon after we met, I would have been alarmed; but since Athena was an octopus, I was thrilled. Although we couldn’t have been more different – I, a terrestrial vertebrate constrained by joints and bound to air; she, a marine mollusk with not a single bone, who breathed water – she was clearly as curious about me as I was about her.”

— Sy Montgomery

36. “But Christopher obeyed a higher calling: the intoxicating call of green grass and sunshine, the sweet scent of the earth on one of the last days of summer.”

— Sy Montgomery

37. “But perhaps, in a world “older and more complete” than ours, there is a love that does not demand a reciprocal debt of need.”

— Sy Montgomery

38. “There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank,” he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers’ dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, “she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away.”

— Sy Montgomery

39. “Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill. Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy. Here is someone following his bliss. Pigs are quite literally made for eating – they were bred to eat and get fat fast.”

— Sy Montgomery

40. “I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren’t in vain and my sorrows weren’t permanent. I can’t do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you; with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.”

— Sy Montgomery

41. “And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didn’t have a chance to grow.”

— Sy Montgomery

42. “Wholeness feels like gratitude. Gratitude that we are safe and happy and together.”

— Sy Montgomery

43. “If the person was out of the room, the octopus would pull off the magnet on the inside of the tank which, with another magnet on the outside of the tank, held a glass-cleaning tool in place. The outside magnet would then crash loudly to the ground, summoning the human much as one might call a butler by ringing a servant’s bell. Ceph keeper Nancy King.”

— Sy Montgomery

44. “The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: “Just about every animal,” Scott says – not just mammals and birds – “can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy.” Once.”

— Sy Montgomery

45. “Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission: to be of service to them whenever they require it.”

— Sy Montgomery

46. “They don’t want to hear how Octavia is different from us. They want to know how we’re the same. They know what it’s like to have an itch. They can imagine what it’s like to be a mother. This brief encounter has changed them. Now they can identify with an octopus. They.”

— Sy Montgomery

47. “In all religions, as in all legal systems. people find ways to skirt the rules. We obey the letter of the law without honoring its spirit, and then reassure ourselves of our righteousness.”

— Sy Montgomery

48. “Bear-time seems slow to us, perhaps, because we do not have the patience for such a life.”

— Sy Montgomery

49. “Most animals on this planet live in the ocean. And most of them are invertebrates.”

— Sy Montgomery

50. “Cambodia is the most heavily mined country on earth, with 4 to 8 million land mines, according to one estimate.”

— Sy Montgomery