The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance that it seemed absurd to call the night dark.

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.

Let us dance in the sun, wearing wild flowers in our hair...

The shrewd marry for money, the scheming marry for status, the calculating marry for power, but the wise marry for love.

I never make conscious decisions.

Dreams should make you think, ‘If I had the guts to do it and I didn’t care what anybody thought, this I what I’d really do’.

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

My tattoos are reminders to hang in there when things get rough.

Kings do with men as with pieces of money; they give them what value they please, and we are obliged to receive them at their current and not at their real value.

Clearly, the Chinese know that we want a good relationship with them

The god of war hates those who hesitate.

Democratic Party is a party that's just out of touch with who the electorate is and who Americans are.