These lion quotes will inspire you. The lion is one of the most recognizable animal symbols in human culture and has been widely depicted in sculptures and paintings, on national flags, and in contemporary films and literature.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, knowledgeable, and encouraging lion quotes, lion sayings, and lion proverbs.
Inspirational Lion Quotes
- “It’s better to be a lion for a day than a sheep all your life.” ~ Elizabeth Kenny
- “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.” ~ Saint Augustine
- “A truly strong person does not need the approval of others any more than a lion needs the approval of sheep.” ~ Vernon Howard , Strong lion quotes
-
“Come out of the masses. Stand-alone like a lion and live your life according to your own light.” ~ Rajneesh
- “I was the shyest human ever invented, but I had a lion inside me that wouldn’t shut up.” ~ Ingrid Bergman
- “It is better to have a lion at the head of an army of sheep, than a sheep at the head of an army of lions.” ~ Daniel Defoe
- “I am not afraid of an army of lions led by a sheep; I am afraid of an army of sheep led by a lion.” ~ Alexander the Great
- “You are all lions – so go your own way. Do not walk the beaten path like sheep, one after another. Do not follow any path. Lions do not follow each other like sheep.” ~ H. W. L. Poonja
-
“If you want to be a lion, you must train with lions.” ~ Carlson Gracie
- “I am impelled, not to squeak like a grateful and apologetic mouse, but to roar like a lion out of pride in my profession.” ~ John Steinbeck , Roar lion quotes
- “A lioness has got a lot more power than the lion likes to think she has.” ~ Jacki Weaver
- “Within each of us there is the heart of a lion, the courage to simply be who & what we are regardless of others opinions or our own fears. Sometimes this courage has been buried beneath years of shaming that may have been so implicit or insidious that we breathed it in, unaware of how it separated us from knowing our own beauty of being. May we each know our own beauty & right to be today. May we drop down into the heart of the lion within & say to shame, when it rears it’s head, “Not today!”” ~ Oriah Dreamer
-
“An army of lions commanded by a deer will never be an army of lions.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
- “The one excellent thing that can be learned from a lion is that whatever a man intends doing should be done by him with a whole-hearted and strenuous effort.” ~ Chanakya
- “An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.” ~ Walter Winchell
-
“Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians – except for the occasional mountain lion steak.” ~ Ted Nugent
- “As I look back on my own life, I recognize this simple truth: The greatest opportunities were the scariest lions. Part of me has wanted to play it safe, but I’ve learned that taking no risks is the greatest risk of all.” ~ Mark Batterson
- “Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.” ~ Martin Amis
- “Neither numbers nor powers nor wealth nor learning nor eloquence nor anything else will prevail, but purity, living the life, in one word, anubhuti, realization. Let there be a dozen such lion-souls in each country, lions who have broken their own bonds, who have touched the Infinite, whose whole soul is gone to Brahman, who care neither for wealth nor power nor fame, and these will be enough to shake the world.” ~ Swami Vivekananda
-
“One must be a fox to recognize traps and a lion to frighten wolves” ~ Niccolo Machiavelli
- “It is all right for the lion and the lamb to lie down together if they are both asleep, but if one of them begins to get active, it is dangerous.” ~ Crystal Eastman
- “One day’s life of a lion is preferable to hundred years of a jackal.” ~ Tipu Sultan
- “The African lions rush to attack bulls; they do not attack butterflies.
[Lat., In tauros Libyci ruunt leones;
Non sunt papilionibus molesti.]” ~ Martial -
“It is not good to wake a sleeping lion.” ~ Philip Sidney
- “As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.” ~ Wally Lamb
- “Only a lion can recognize a lion’s roar.” ~ Kodo Sawaki
- “Well, you know, I played Mufasa in the workshop of The Lion King.” ~ Keith David
- “That’s a valiant flea that dares eat his breakfast on the lip of a lion.” ~ William Shakespeare
-
“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.” ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
- “It’s an incredibly difficult thing to bring a giraffe down. They can kill a lion with a single blow from their feet.” ~ Joanna Lumley
- “Fear not, we are of the nature of the lion, and cannot descend to the destruction of mice and such small beasts.” ~ Elizabeth I , Fear lion quotes
- “The difference between a brave man and a coward is a coward thinks twice before jumping in the cage with a lion. The brave man doesn’t know what a lion is. He just thinks he does.” ~ Charles Bukowski
- “I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage, he is at least safe from people.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
-
“I was not the lion, but it fell to me to give the lion’s roar.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “A lion’s work hours are only when he’s hungry; once he’s satisfied, the predator and prey live peacefully together.” ~ Chuck Jones
- “The lion is, however, rarely heard – much more seldom seen.” ~ John Hanning Speke
- “I am sometimes a fox and sometimes a lion. The whole secret of government lies in knowing when to be the one or the other.” ~ Napoleon Bonaparte
-
“Dressed in the lion’s skin, the ass spread terror far and wide.” ~ Jean de La Fontaine
- “I remember in the circus learning that the clown was the prince, the high prince. I always thought that the high prince was the lion or the magician, but the clown is the most important.” ~ Roberto Benigni
- “People go to the zoo and they like the lion because it’s scary. And the bear because it’s intense, but the monkey makes people laugh.” ~ Lorne Michaels
- “The lion’s share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the ’60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid.” ~ Branford Marsalis
-
“A lion is made up of the lambs he’s digested.” ~ Giorgos Seferis
- “I have this huge lion tattoo embossed on my arm. I was a little worried as to how we would cover it up. But my makeup man covered the tattoo with makeup. It took close to two hours.” ~ Sanjay Dutt
- “The lion and the calf shall lie down together but the calf won’t get much sleep.” ~ Woody Allen
- “When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.” ~ Julie Taymor
-
“True, the lion is a mighty, noble animal, but it is an animal nevertheless…” ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “A lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing.” ~ William Shakespeare
- “There has to be some limit to what lawyers can take from their clients. Otherwise, cagey attorneys end up with the lion’s share of the settlement and the victims end up with little more than scraps.” ~ Dennis Hastert
- “That was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren’t many parts for lions.” ~ Bert Lahr
-
“Roused by the lash of his own stubborn tail our lion now will foreign foes assail.” ~ John Dryden
- “My mum loves cats so I took her to see the lion cubs which at about a year old are actually quite big. She wasn’t scared at all and went straight over and kissed one on the mouth! She thought they were just like her pets at home.” ~ Amanda Holden , Love lion quotes
- “We are all vegetarians here, and except for a mountain lion that’s been hanging around and killed our dog, we don’t have a care in the world.” ~ Dirk Benedict
- “When many work together for a goal, Great things may be accomplished. It is said a lion cub was killed By a single colony of ants.” ~ Sakya Pandita
-
“There are no lazy veteran lion hunters.” ~ Norman Ralph Augustine
- “I never use a score when conducting my orchestra… Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?” ~ Dimitris Mitropoulos
- “Every dog is a lion at home.” ~ Henry George Bohn
- “Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion” ~ Samuel Gompers
-
“The Lion King always makes me cry, especially when Simba’s father gets trampled.” ~ Vanessa Hudgens
- “Courage is poorly housed that dwells in numbers; the lion never counts the herd that are about him, nor weighs how many flocks he has to scatter.” ~ Aaron Hill
- “At a certain point, even if the one alpha male is dominant, at a certain point there’s a younger lion that is stronger, and everyone knows it.” ~ Josh Lucas
- “As far as a nuclear-weapons-free zone, you know, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and you don’t need a new lamb every day to satisfy the lion, then we might have this kind of transformation in the Middle East.” ~ Benjamin Netanyahu
-
“An Englishman, being flattered, is a lamb; threatened, a lion.” ~ George Chapman
- “It was the nation and the race dwelling all round the globe that had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “At twenty a man is a peacock, at thirty a lion, at forty a camel, at fifty a serpent, at sixty a dog, at seventy an ape, at eighty a nothing at all.” ~ Baltasar Gracian
- “Whenever the lion fish in the fish tank in the captain’s ready room died it was always a sad moment.” ~ Patrick Stewart
Summary: The lion (Panthera leo) is a large felid of the genus Panthera native mainly to Africa. It has a muscular, deep-chested body, short, rounded head, round ears, and a hairy tuft at the end of its tail.
