Zoölogists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50—but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.
You now have learned enough to see that Cats are much like you and me and other people whom we find possessed of various types of mind. For some are sane and some are mad and some are good and some are bad and some are better, some are worse – but all may be described in verse.
Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.
Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin, but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in all my life![thought Alice]
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
We call ourselves a dog’s “master” — but who ever dared call himself the “master” of a cat? We own a dog — he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat — he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there.
Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement.
Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic — nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.
The Cat in Gloves catches no Mice.
