If you are pitched into misery, remember that your days on this earth are counted and you might as well make the best of those you have left.

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.

When we want to see someone in a certain way, we find a way, but when we don't we have to wake up and see who they truly are and not what our pain or anger chooses to believe.

Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.” —Sanskrit poem

The great truth about Christianity is not that we love God - it's that God loves us.

To pursue knowledge is obligatory on every believing man and woman.

I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!

The greatest weakness in the church today is that the servants of God keep looking over their shoulder for the approval of men.

Since when was an emotional argument won by logic?

Friendship of the wise is good; a wise enemy is better than a foolish friend.

Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share.

Do fish get cramps after eating?