These great quotes about dogs are excerpted from the Sporting Classics e-book, Passages. You can download the book FREE and enjoy content like this every day by signing up for the Sporting Classics Daily e-newsletter.
“At this spot are deposited the remains of those who possessed Beauty without Vanity, Strength without Insolence, Courage without Ferocity, and all the Virtues of Man, without his Vices. This praise would be unmeaning flattery if inscribed over human ashes and is but just tribute to the memory of some dogs.” These words by an unknown author appear on a sign overlooking Big Fish Lake in Pasco County, Florida. It was this lake, incidentally, which produced a 20-pound 2-ounce largemouth bass, the one-time world record.
“Boy,” the old man said, “I will tell you a very wise thing. If a man is really intelligent, there’s practically nothing a good dog can’t teach him. But a dumb man can’t learn anything from a smart dog, while a dumb dog can occasionally learn something from a smart man. Remember that.” Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1957
A dog does not live as long as a man and this natural law is the font of many tears. If a boy and puppy might grow to manhood and doghood together, and together grow old, and so in due course die, full many a heartache might be avoided. But the world is not so ordered, and dogs will die and men will weep for them so long as there are dogs and men. Ben Ames Williams, Bird Dog Book, 1989
A dog is the only creature on earth that lives with his God. Charles Morgan, On Retrievers, Hunting, Bird Dog Training, 1971
A man who’s got to break a dog don’t deserve the dog. Robert Ruark, The Old Man and the Boy, 1957
And he was jest a dog, Lawd, but such a dog as ain’t never been on dis-yeah green earth . . . It ain’t for no common field hand like me to know what kind of ’rangemints you got up yonder, and maybe dey ain’t no allowance made for dogs and such. But in time I heard bird-dog folks say you got a plantation leased up yonder, and it’s a thousand miles long and twice as wide, and dey ain’t no briers ner rattlesnakes, and it ain’t never ground-froze, and de birds is golden birds with sapphire eyes and dey don’t run and dey don’t flush wild, and ain’t no night to spoil de hunt, and no whistle to call the dogs in; and dat’s where de good dogs go when dey die. Vereen Bell, “Wesley’s Prayer for Old Sam,” Two of a Kind, 1943
But there is one best place to bury a dog. If you bury him in this spot, he will come to you when you call – come to you over the grim, dim frontiers of death, and down the wellremembered path to your side again. And though you call a dozen living dogs to heel, they shall not growl at him nor resent his coming, for he belongs there. People may scoff at you, who see no lightest blade of grass bent by his foot-fall, who hear no whimper, people who may never really have had a dog. Smile at them, for you shall know something that is hidden from them. The one best place to bury a good dog is in the heart of his master. Ben Hur Lampman for the Portland Oregonian. Reprinted in Labrador Retriever – Friend and Worker by Kip Farrington, Jr., 1976
Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of these illusions. Dean Koontz, The Darkest Evening of the Year, 2007
Establishing oneself in a dog’s confidence is the foundation of training. Archibald Rutledge, Hunter’s Choice, 1946
Every bird hunter, and that goes for the breed, secretly dreams and longs to own a royally bred animal, broken to the Queen’s taste and able to win on any circuit of field trials. But in the end, like most of us, he must be satisfied with plain Belle or Jack, and finds in them the traits of a lowlier dogcraft that can be wine to his soul. Nash Buckingham, Mark Right, 1936
