Those who still eat flesh when they could do otherwise have no claim to be serious moralists.

My refusing to eat flesh occasioned an inconveniency, and I was frequently chided for my singularity, but, with this lighter repast, I made the greater progress, for greater clearness of head and quicker comprehension. Flesh eating is unprovoked murder.

Flesh eaters are those who backbite; they eat human flesh.

One of the superstitions condemned by the Master, you will remember, is that man needs flesh for food. That IS, of course, a superstition, because there are many thousands of people who exist in perfect health without it. There are probably some few people who, owing to bad heredity, and of course to their own karma, are really unable to make their bodies digest the purer forms of food, but they are very few. I have myself known of some two instances, I think, among the great many thousands of Theosophists, and others—who, after really trying for a long time to adopt vegetarian diet, found that they were absolutely unable to do it, but all the rest, after a certain amount of difficulty just at first, were able to settle down to vegetarian food. It is unquestionably proved that people (all but a very few) can exist perfectly well without saddling themselves with the crime of taking part in the slaughter of animals. (Thirty-second Talk)

A human body in no way resembles those that were born for ravenousness; it hath no hawk’s bill, no sharp talon, no roughness of teeth, no such strength of stomach or heat of digestion, as can be sufficient to convert or alter such heavy and fleshy fare.

The time will come in the world's history, and a movement is setting in that direction even now, when it will be deemed as strange a thing to find a man or a woman who eats flesh as food, as it is now to find a man or a woman who refrains from eating it. And personally, I share the belief with many others, that the highest mental, physical, and spiritual excellence will come to a person only when, among other things, he refrains from a flesh and blood diet.

Man can live without animal flesh; consequently the eating of this flesh is purely to gratify an appetite — and a perverted appetite at that. No normal appetite could possibly crave flesh of any kind. So that there is no possible excuse for the killing and eating of animals, than this — except, of course, ignorance. After all, that is the greatest factor! It is against this taking of life unnecessarily that the vegetarian protests…

For the moment we will put aside the consideration of the effect upon others — which is so infinitely more important — and think only of the results for the man himself. It is necessary to do this because one of the objections frequently brought against vegetarianism is that it is a beautiful theory, but one the working of which is impracticable, since it is supposed that a man cannot live without devouring dead flesh. That objection is irrational, and is founded upon ignorance or perversion of facts. I am myself an example of its falsity; for I have lived without the pollution of flesh food — without meat, fish or fowl — for the last thirty-eight years, and I not only still survive, but have been during all that time in remarkably good health. Nor am I in any way peculiar in this, for I know some thousands of others who have done the same thing. I know some younger ones who have been so happy as to be unpolluted by the eating of flesh during the whole of their lives; and they are distinctly freer from disease than those who partake of such things.

No one who eats the flesh of animals can progress spiritually beyond the average.

It is a specious but very false reason to allege that, since man has acquired this taste, he ought to be permitted to indulge it — in the first place because Nature has not given him cooked flesh, and because several ages must have rolled away before fire was used. … Nature, then, could have given man only raw or living flesh, and we know that it is repugnant to him over the whole extent of the earth.

At any rate, both because of the clear trend in the recent history of biology and because there is not a shred of evidence to support it, I will not in these pages entertain any hypotheses on what used to be called the mind-body dualism, the idea that inhabiting the matter of the body is something made of quite different stuff, called mind.

Yes; the stain rests upon the flesh-eaters, not upon the flesh providers!

I have never yet happened upon a trace of evidence that seemed to show that any one animal was ever made for another as much as it was made for itself.

Here I would observe that I cannot see how those whom he speaks of as abstaining from certain victims, in accordance with the traditions of their fathers, are consequently bound to abstain from the flesh of all animals. We do not indeed deny that the divine word does seem to command something similar to this, when to raise us to a higher and purer life it says, “It is good neither to eat flesh, nor to drink wine, nor anything whereby thy brother stumbleth, or is offended, or is made weak;” (Rom. xiv. 21) and again, “Destroy not him with thy meat, for whom Christ died;”(Rom. xiv. 15) and again, “If meat make my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world standeth, lest I make my brother to offend.”(I Co. viii. 13)