I thought they were helping me. I was so full of trust in them that I felt grateful as they carried me in the air. Only when they threw me overboard did I begin to have doubts.

You must take life the way it comes at you and make the best of it.

My life is like a memento mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull at my side to remind me of the folly of human ambition.

Slice a pear and you will find that its flesh is incandescent white. It glows with inner light. Those who carry a knife and a pear are never afraid of the dark.

Zoo is an artificial territory, an approximation. Civilization is our natural territory.

To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness--how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped view of things? This peephole is all I've got!

We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.

I know zoos are no longer in people's good graces. Religion faces the same problem. Certain illusions about freedom plague them both.

If you stumble at mere believability, what are you living for? Isn't love hard to believe?

No one dies of nausea, but it can seriously sap the will to live.

Every tree is known by its fruits. So a man is known his deeds.

Confidence comes from hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

It's hard to see clearly when your eyes are squinched tight out of fear.

Good intentions are not an excuse for maladministration of this magnitude.

Avalanches of evil begin with a single pebble of sin.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don't like her daughter to resemble her in.

Iran? Number 1! Russia? Number 1! USA? Hacktui!

A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her.

I don't go to clubs and throw money and pop bottles. That's not my thing, no disrespect.