There are many things we can learn about leopards, and this collection of the top 100 leopard quotes will be the perfect must-read list!
So what are you waiting for? Be sure you don’t miss out on some great pieces of wisdom and facts about these powerful and elegant wild cats.
Leopards are solitary creatures that only spend time with others of their kind when they’re mating or raising their young.
However, being isolated does not make them weak, and it definitely doesn’t make them cower when facing enemies.
In fact, leopards are one of the greatest symbols of power and independence.
Learn more about them here.
And don’t forget to check out these tiger quotes.
Best Leopard Quotes
1. “A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.” – Ivy Compton-Burnett
2. “A world without leopards, well, who would want to live in it?” – Diana Vreeland
3. “Yet technique matters, even so. God uses it, for a buffalo is not a leopard.” – James Dickey
4. “You don’t see sick animals in the wild. You don’t see lame animals in the wild, and it’s all because of the predator—the lion, the tiger, the leopard, all the cats.” – Tippi Hedren
5. “Be motivated like the falcon, hunt gloriously. Be magnificent as the leopard, fight to win. Spend less time with nightingales and peacocks—one is all talk, the other only color.” – Rumi
6. “Lions make leopards tame.” – William Shakespeare
7. “The penguin doesn’t know it’s cute, and the leopard seal doesn’t know it’s kind of big and monstrous. This is just the food chain unfolding.” – Paul Nicklen
8. “We only asked for leopards to guard our thinning dreams.” – Charles Bukowski
9. “Long ago, our ancestors sacrificed their children to the leopards. The souls of the children grew inside the leopards, until the leopards became human. We were Gods then.” – DeWitt Bodeen
Famous Leopard Quotes
10. “Eyes easily deceived; same leopard can hide behind different spots.” – Lester Ziffren
11. “The Lord is a shoving leopard.” – William Archibald Spooner
12. “Leopards did not kill this man. Leopards never kill with claws alone. Use teeth!” – Carroll Young
13. “I started to turn my life around for the better and try to instil a bit of stability and balance back into it, and take a back seat to violence. I wanted to leave that part of my life behind. The leopard wanted to ditch its spots!” – Stephen Richards
14. “Life is like the leopard’s den, and once you find you’ve fallen in, a safari of the heart surely comes to an end.” – Burleigh Drummond
15. “The leopard is a cruel lover. His tenderness breaks the gazelle’s heart.” – Aleksandr Voinov
16. “The autumn always gets me badly, as it breaks into colours. I want to go south, where there is no autumn, where the cold doesn’t crouch over one like a snow-leopard waiting to pounce.” – D. H. Lawrence
17. “In the third month, the sun is rising, the noar and the leopard on the field of Mars to fight; the tired leopard raises its eye to the heavens, sees an eagle playing around the sun.” – Nostradamus
18. “But phony, Hemingway was not, and poseur he was not. He did not shoot lions and leopards because he was searching for the answer to life. He shot lions and leopards because he bloody well liked to hunt and shoot, and killing was the best punctuation mark at the end of the intricate and fascinating process of hunting.” – Robert Ruark
19. “At the top of the mountain, we are all snow leopards.” – Hunter S. Thompson
20. “As a leopard feels at home with a leopard.” – George Eliot
21. “I caught the smell of a warm woman and I saw the eyes of an insomniac leopard in the darkness.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. “The only way a no-legged leopard could hurt you is if it fell out of a tree onto your head.” – Ellen DeGeneres
23. “This leopard uses its spots to help it hide in the bush.” – Janis Diamond
24. “The pale stars are gone! For the sun, their swift shepherd, to their folds compelling them; in the depths of the dawn, hastes, in a meteor-eclipsing array, and flees beyond his blue dwelling, as fawns flee the leopard.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wise Leopard Quotes
25. “You’re like this leopard who’s pretending to be a house cat.” – Holly Black
26. “A leopard doesn’t change his spots just because you bring him in from the jungle and try to housebreak him and turn him into a pet. He may learn to sheathe his claws in order to beg a few scraps off the dinner table, and you may teach him to be a beast of burden, but it doesn’t pay to forget that he’ll always be what he was born—a wild animal.” – George Rockwell
27. “Oh a leopard can’t change his spots, and oil and water can’t mix. But I have recently heard, an old dog learned new tricks.” – John Rox
28. “I don’t have to be logical. I’m a leopard. We’re considered wild animals, you know.” – Amy Neftzger
29. “Now that I come to think of it, you can’t really get a leopard to appreciate the notion that it has spots. You can explain it carefully to the leopard, but it will just sit there looking at you, knowing that you are made of meat. After a while it will perhaps kill you.” – Geoffrey K. Pullum
30. “No blind spots in the leopard’s eyes can only help to jeopardize the lives of lambs, the shepherd cries.” – Collin John Newman
31. “Leopard is an animal design, and my designs come from nature.” – Roberto Cavalli
32. “A leopard doesn’t change its spots, mark the one willing to explore, a chance to see so much more, a tug at the heart will light the spark.” – Mario William Vitale
33. “In a Leopard, the spots are not observed.” – George Herbert
34. “The goal is to live with God-like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.” – Joseph Campbell
Leopard Quotes You’ll Love
35. “I know I’m going to shoot a leopard.” – Adam Vinatieri
36. “The appeal of the cat lies in the very fact that she has formed no close bond with man—that she has the uncompromising independence of a tiger or a leopard while she is hunting in his stables and barns.” – Konrad Lorenz
37. “Some kinds of animals burrow in the ground; others do not. Some animals are nocturnal, as the owl and the bat; others use the hours of daylight. There are tame animals and wild animals. Man and the mule are always tame; the leopard and the wolf are invariably wild, and others, as the elephant, are easily tamed.” – Aristotle
38. “What a luxury a cat is—the moments of shocking and startling pleasure in a day, the feel of the beast, the soft sleekness under your palm, the warmth when you wake on a cold night, the grace and charm even in a quite ordinary workaday puss. Cat walks across your room, and in that lonely stalk you see leopard or even panther, or it turns its head to acknowledge you and the yellow blaze of those eyes tells you what an exotic visitor you have here, in this household friend, the cat who purrs as you stroke, or rub his chin, or scratch his head.” – Doris Lessing
39. “We have a lion, tiger, liger—the father is a lion and the mother is a tiger—black and spotted leopard, mountain lion, Asian leopard cats. We’ve got a tremendous number of the exotic felines.” – Tippi Hedren
40. “Mother Nature is always speaking. She speaks in a language understood within the peaceful mind of the sincere observer. Leopards, cobras, monkeys, rivers and trees; they all served as my teachers when I lived as a wanderer in the Himalayan foothills.” – Radhanath Swami
41. “But we still find the world astounding. We can’t get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished—the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes—flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.” – Margaret Atwood
42. “The Ethiopian cannot change his skin nor the leopard his spots.” – Henry David Thoreau
43. “Kilimanjaro is a snow-covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called the Masai ‘Ngaje Ngai’—the House of God. Close to the western summit there is a dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.” – Ernest Hemingway
44. “We who have seen him now, light on his feet, smooth moving as a leopard, a young man with an old man’s science, the most beautiful fighting machine I have ever seen, may live to see him fat, slow, old, and bald taking a beating from a younger man. But I would like to hazard a prediction that whoever beats Joe Louis in an honest fight in the next fifteen years will have to get up the floor to do it.” – Ernest Hemingway
Leopard Quotes on Nature and Their Habitat
45. “Snow leopard sightings are very, very rare.” – Som Ale
46. “Snow Leopards are the ambassadors of Asia’s high mountains. Conserving these endangered animals and their habitats means managing ecosystems sustainably, adapting to the impacts of climate change, and maintaining water security for over a quarter of the world’s people.” – Carlos Drews
47. “I went to South Africa on safari and came eye to eye with a beautiful leopard. We were so close; I was staring at him for a long time and I felt a recognition of my own nature.” – Bail Ling
48. “In general, sharks are struggling in the wild, and leopard sharks are no different. If these animals aren’t allowed to reach an age or size where they can reproduce before they are removed from the environment, that has drastic implications for future generations.” – Christina Slager
49. “The African leopard is an audacious animal, although it is ungrateful of me to say a word against him, after the way he has let me off personally. Taken as a whole, he is the most lovely animal I have ever seen; only seeing him, in the one way you can gain a full idea of his beauty, namely in his native forest, is not an unmixed joy to a person, like myself, of a nervous disposition.” – Mary Kingsley
50. “The snow leopard is absolutely magnificent. It represents really what endangered species are all about.” – Jack Hanna
51. “If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that-so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of transformation through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery.” – Jeremy Griffith
52. “Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours—nature—lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man.” – Henry David Thoreau
53. “It is well known that apes in the wild offer spontaneous assistance to each other, defending against leopards, say, or consoling distressed companions with tender embraces.” – Francis de Waal
54. “When I was chased by a striped leopard in dense camouflage of the jungle, there was an overwhelming craving to clamber up the tree; and hide in the myriad of branches.” – Nikhil Parekh
Leopard Quotes That Will Help You Get to Know Them Better
55. “What does the leopard teach us? Not to be intimidated by animals that outweigh him—to be fearless and daring.” – J.D. Jacobs
56. “Of all the creatures in the world that really frighten me—the hyena in Africa, the great white shark—leopard seals are near the top of the list. They’re killers. If my team spots one, they’ll pull me out of the water.” – Lewis Gordon Pugh
57. “I was out training one black night when I heard a noise. I turned around and saw a leopard. I threw some stones at him and he went away, so I went on my way.” – Filbert Bayi
58. “At that moment, she saw not the man but the leopard within. And she realized the truth far too late—he wasn’t human.” – Nalini Singh
59. “I’ve eaten lion, leopard, crocodile, and python. I don’t recommend lions. It tastes exactly like when a tomcat comes into your house and sprays. Snakes and crocodiles are great—a cross between lobster and chicken.” – Wilber Smith
60. “There are going to be animals in Heaven. The prophet Isaiah said that the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” – David Bergh
61. “I mean that in the absence of food, baboons will organize themselves to find a meal, but in the absence of leopards they will never organize themselves to find a leopard.” – Daniel Quinn
62. “The old adage about a leopard never changing its spots? Too fucking right.” – Sofia Tate
63. “To expect a convict to have the strength to give up smoking is to expect a leopard to change his spots, become vegetarian, and learn to knit—all on the same day.” – Stephen Fry
64. “It would be wrong to describe Fennel as courageous as it would be wrong to describe a leopard as courageous. It runs when it can, but when cornered, turns to be one of the most dangerous and vicious of all jungle beasts.” – James Hadley Chase
Beautiful and Poetic Leopard Quotes
65. “We were the leopards, the lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, leopards, jackals, and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
66. “When you patiently examine the beautiful skin of the leopard after it’s hard day’s search for the meat it enjoys, you shall not only see the sweat that went into its search for the meat, but you shall also realize the scent of the sweat beneath the beautiful skin.” – Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
67. “His lithe and lethal grace is hypnotic, too, in the way he moves like a leopard in the African grass, even if it’s just striding down a sidewalk. I got sucked into all this, but I can’t afford to let it.” – Jasinda Wilder
68. “It was as though the man-eater—for no other leopard would have killed the goat and laid it on the track—had said, ‘Here, if you want your goat so badly, take it; and as it is now dark and you have a long way to go, we will see which of you lives to reach the village.’” – Jim Corbett
69. “It was as if he had two faces—one of utmost calm, one of furious action; and he wore both with ease. He was like the animal whose face he wore, able to sit in silence for hours, without moving a muscle, then flying like a raging storm into battle, returning again to perfect calm when the fight was over.” – Kaoru Kurimoto
70. “Leopards, that is ordinary forest leopards, do not like rain and invariably seek shelter, but the man eater was not an ordinary leopard, and there was no knowing what his likes or dislikes were, or what he might or might not do.” – Jim Corbett
71. “He is wounded, but he is still the leopard—still dangerous. His eyes look through you, until they don’t. That’s when he’ll kill you.” – M.C. Scott
72. “Faraway, a leopard barked that high, dissatisfied deep roar it cuts off so sharply, as if its annoyance is too great to express, can only be appeased.” – Mike Bond
73. “She slammed into an invisible wall and flew back once more, landing on her back. She lay sprawled on the ground, trying to shift into her leopard form. But her enhancing spirit held her firmly in the human body.” – A.O. Peart
74. “To knock our conscience, they won’t bang our doors. Like us, they’re not silly. Nonsense, they are the valorous carnivores.” – Munia Khan
Funny Leopard Quotes
75. “My weakness is wearing too much leopard print.” – Jackie Collins
76. “I’ve never met a leopard print I didn’t like.” – Diana Vreeland
77. “He was a leper, you idiot! Not a leopard.” – Christopher Moore
78. “Leaping quickly on the leopard’s back, I face the brunt of his attack. In the land of nod, I’m king, until the alarm clock rings.” – Burleigh Drummond
79. “As far as I’m concerned, leopards are neutral.” – Jenna Lyons
80. “There’s so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic.” – Lily Tomlin
81. “We all know the leopard can’t change his stripes.” – Al Gore
82. “A girl in want of a leopard still has feet.” – Catherine M. Valente
83. “Clothing was no problem at all. Everybody wore leopard skins—everybody except the leopards.” – Heck Allen
84. “They’re not bunnies, they’re leopards. And they’re not stupid, they’re special. We’re special.” – Deborah Kaplan
85. “We’re the leopards. The leader of the pack lives down in the local drain. We’re the leopards, King Kong built a car inside his brain.” – Marc Bolan
86. “One day, a leopard stalked into the synagogue, roaring and lashing its tail. Three weeks later, it had become part of the liturgy.” – Franz Kafka
87. “I hate to tell you this, but I think your leopard just ate a goddess.” – Rick Riordan
88. “A leopard can’t change its spots, but a cosmetologist can.” – Ankala Subbarao
89. “Sometimes, a leopard can change its spots if the right woman comes along.” – Carolyn Brown
More Leopard Quotes You Might Find Interesting
90. “One of my desert island books, ‘The Leopard’ is not so much a novel as a eulogy for a way of life and a Sicily that was already lost by the time Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing.” – Ruth Ware
91. “But I was just really blown away that you could just buy a snow leopard. For me, it was like buying a panda bear or a Komodo dragon.” – Eric Goode
92. “Leopard print has been my thing forever! When I was a teenager, my entire room was done in leopard print—it’s timeless, chic, and always in style. When in doubt, leopard!” – Khloe Kardashian
93. “I love anything leopard print, but sometimes an all over print can be a bit much.” – Ashley Madekwe
94. “I’ve worn my share of leopard pink boots to premieres or belts the size of cars. I thought my pink leopard boots were so cool.” – Brittany Snow
95. “I think every woman should have a leopard, but not every woman will wear a leopard. You have to have courage to wear a leopard.” – Rachel Zoe
96. “You can’t just sit around in leopard-print slippers and drink champagne all day and think everything’s gonna work out somehow.” – Michael Schur
97. “The Snow Leopard’s Tale is a mystical pilgrimage into that wild country where animal passion and the human heart begin to walk the very same trail. Whether one has been in the business of adventuring, as Thomas McIntyre has, or has enjoyed such adventures from the safety of one’s armchair, The Snow Leopard’s Tale is a haunting, beautifully written, and thought-provoking tale, as all great parables are.” – Ted Kerasote
98. “You don’t scare me. Your dominance does. I’m not sure how to react around you, to your leopard.” – Lia Davis
99. “Came to her—not the athletic, graceful leopard of the ballroom at Hanford House—but her very own wounded animal. Her husband. Her lover. Her best friend.” – Laura Lee Guhrke
100. “The leopard lived in every aspect of him—from his strength, to his anger, to his rage.” – Nalini Singh
What Important Life Lessons Did You Learn From Leopards?
Leopards are largely independent creatures, but they survive—and thrive—greatly on their own in the wild. This is mainly because leopards are in tune with their senses and have great intuition.
They trust their instincts and decisions, and they never back down. This is one of the greatest lessons we can learn from them.
We never need to rely on others to survive and succeed in life. Everything is in our own hands, and it is up to us to tap into our instincts and intuition in order to arrive at good and well-thought-of decisions.
Did this collection teach you anything new? Which quote from today’s list had the most impact on you? List them down in the comments section below.