"Of Sheep, Cows, Goats, and other animals, 'Endless multitudes of these will have their little children taken from them ripped open and flayed and most barbarously quartered.'”
— Leonardo da Vinci
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Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519)
Da Vinci wrote that he could not abide any suffering inflicted on animals or the horror of man inflicting any pain on them. He refused to consume animals or any animal products and his vegetarian diet was acknowledgement that he recognized the cruelty in eating meat and dairy. In a letter by Andrea Corsali’s to Giuliano de’ Medici, he says, “Certain infidels called Guzzarati [Hindus] do not feed upon anything that contains blood, nor do they permit among them any injury be done to any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci.” _____
“If you are as you have described yourself the king of the animals –– it would be better for you to call yourself king of the beasts since you are the greatest of them all! –– why do you not help them so that they may presently be able to give you their young in order to gratify your palate, for the sake of which you have tried to make yourself a tomb for all the animals? Even more I might say if to speak the entire truth were permitted me.”
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Leo Tolstoy — 'As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.'
Einstein was a vegetarian during the last year of his life, although he had supported the idea for a long time. In a letter to Max Kariel he said, "I have always eaten animal flesh with a somewhat guilty conscience," and soon after became a vegetarian.
The Life of Nikola Tesla by John J. O'Neill (1944)
"With the passing decades, Tesla shifted away from a meat diet. He substituted fish, always boiled, and finally eliminated the meat entirely. He later almost entirely eliminated the fish and lived on a vegetarian diet. Milk was his main standby, and toward the end of his life it was the principal item of diet, served warm. As a youth he drank a great deal of coffee, and, while he gradually became aware that he suffered unfavorable influences from it, he found it a difficult habit to break. When he finally made the decision to drink no more of it, he adhered to his good intentions but was forced to recognize the fact that the desire for it remained. He combated this by ordering with each meal a pot of his favorite coffee, and having a cup of it poured so that he would get the aroma. It required ten years for the aroma of the coffee to transform itself into a nuisance so that he felt secure in no longer having it served. Tea and cocoa he also considered injurious. He was a heavy smoker in his youth, mostly of cigars. A sister who seemed fatally ill, when he was in his early twenties, said she would try to get better if he would give up smoking. He did so immediately. His sister recovered, and he never smoked again."
Quotes (according to Ovid): from The Extended Circle by Jon Wynne-Tyson.
Alas, what wickedness to swallow flesh into our own flesh, to fatten our greedy bodies by cramming in other bodies, to have one living creature fed by the death of another! In the midst of such wealth as earth, the best of mothers, provides, nothing forsooth satisfies you, but to behave like the Cyclopes, inflicting sorry wounds with cruel teeth! You cannot appease the hungry cravings of your wicked, gluttonous stomachs except by destroying some other life. - Depicted in Ovid: The Metamorphoses, translated by Mary M.Innes
As long as man continues to be the ruthless destroyer of lower living beings he will never know health or peace. For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love. - attributed by Ovid
Animals share with us the privilege of having a soul. - attributed by Ovid
If men with fleshly mortals must be fed, And chew with bleeding teeth the breathing bread; What else is this but to devour our guests, And barbarously renew Cyclopean feasts? While Earth not only can your needs supply, But, lavish of her store, provides for luxury; A guiltless feast administers with ease, And without blood is prodigal to please. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .attributed by Ovid.
The first prominent modern vegetarian was the Greek philosopher Pythagoras who lived towards the end of the 6th century BC. The Pythagorean diet came to mean an avoidance of the flesh of slaughtered animals. Pythagorean ethics first became a philosophical morality between 490-430 BC with a desire to create a universal and absolute law including injunctions not to kill "living creatures," to abstain from "harsh-sounding bloodshed," in particular animal sacrifice, and "never to eat meat." ivu.org/history/greece_rome/pythagoras.html
Jace Rivera
Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans: Passages in the Doxographists The souls of animals called unreasoning are reasonable, not however with active reasoning powers, because of an imperfect mixture of the bodies and because they do not have the power of speech, as in the case of apes and dogs; for these have intelligence but not the power of speech.
And it is said that Zaratas forbade men to eat beans because he said that at the beginning and composition of all things when the earth was still a whole, the bean arose. And he says that the proof of this is that if one chews a bean to a pulp and exposes it to the sun for a certain time (for the sun will affect it quickly), it gives out the odour of human seed. And he says that there is another and clearer proof: if when a bean is in flower we were to take the bean and its flower, and putting it into a pitcher moisten it and then bury it in the earth, and after a few days dig it up again, we should see in the first place that it had the form of a womb, and examining it closely we should find the head of a child growing with it.
Pythagoras laid down the doctrine of the monad and of foreknowledge and the interdict on sacrificing to the gods then believed on, and he bade men not to partake of beings that had life, and to refrain from wine. And he drew a line between the things from the moon upwards, calling these immortal, and those below, which he called mortal; and he taught the transmigration of souls from bodies into bodies even as far as animals and beasts.
Pythagoras the Samian, son of Mnesarchos, said that the monad is god, and that nothing has been brought into being apart from this. He was wont to say that wise men ought not to sacrifice animals to the gods, nor yet to eat what had life, or beans, nor to drink wine. And he was wont to say that all things from the moon downward were subject to change, while from the moon upward they were not. And he said that the soul goes at death into other animals.
Thou never didst them wrong, nor no man wrong; And as the butcher takes away the calf And binds the wretch, and beats it when it strays, Bearing it to the bloody slaughter-house, Even so remorseless have they borne him hence; And as the dam runs lowing up and down, Looking the way her harmless young one went, And can do nought but wail her darling’s loss.
It was uncommon then to be a vegetarian in the 1600, since he adhered to a vegetarian diet. It was generally believed that 400 years ago that eating meat was an uncommon habit. In Shakespeare’s time he promoted more a vegetarian lifestyle which was considered more healthy than ordinary diet. natureat-blog.com/william-shakespeare-the-value-of-veganism-since-1600/
