A child raised on a desert island, alone, without social interaction, without language, and thus lacking empathy, is still a sentient being.
When you open the door and invite in all sentient beings as your guests, you have to drop your agenda.
The primary dues a writer or any artist pays is to remain sentient, and to forfeit the illusionary luxury of such anesthetics as avoidance, numbness, and denials.
Never open your story with a character thinking, I advise my students. As a further precaution, don’t put a character in a room alone – create a friend, a bystander, a genie, for God’s sake, any sentient creature with whom your main character can converse, perhaps argue or, better yet, engage in some action. If a person is out and doing, it’s more likely that something interesting might happen to her or him. Shut up in a room with only his thoughts for company well, that way lies fictional disaster.
Animals are sentient creatures. I love them very much. I do not feel that we have the right to torture, murder, and abuse them for our own disgusting dietary and fashion wants and needs.
May all sentient beings be happy and free of suffering.
Today is the first day of the rest of your short, brutish existence as a sentient creature before being snuffed out into utter nothingness for all eternity.
Completely trusting a way that you can't do by yourself, that you do with all sentient beings, is immediate liberation.
We should be able to refuse to live if the price of living be the torture of sentient beings.
If you want to help sentient beings, you have to get your hands dirty.
This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.
As human beings, we are the genetic elite, the sentient, contemplating and innovating sum of countless genetic accidents and transcription errors.
Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.
There is little that separates humans from other sentient beings - we all feel joy, we all deeply crave to be alive and to live freely, and we all share this planet together.
Even if a bodhisattva investigates the highest wisdom, one is not a proper bodhisattva unless one applies skillful means for the benefit of other sentient beings.
What do you mean, blindly? That baby is a very sentient creature… That baby sees the world with a completeness that you and I will never know again. His doors of perception have not yet been closed. He still experiences the moment he lives in.
New sentient creatures filled the unseen depths, Life's glory and swiftness ran in the beauty of beasts.
The Buddha and all sentient beings are not two.
We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.
Effective translation of natural languages comes awfully close to requiring a sentient translator program.
