The world isn't just the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something, we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?

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 I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice - my voice.

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

Put yourself on view. This brings your talents to light.

Equal wealth and equal opportunities of culture have simply made us all members of one class.

If God, like a father, denies us what we want now it is in order to give us some far better thing later on. The will of God, we can rest assured, is invariably a better thing.

The errors of the observer come from the qualities of the human mind.

This hill though high I covent ascend; The difficulty will not me offend; For I perceive the way of life lies here. Come, pluck up, heart; let's neither faint nor fear.

Everything in Gatlin was rigged. Why would the carnival games be any different?

Any familiarity with photographic history shows that manipulation is integral to photography.

The ponderous tomes are bales of the mind's merchandise.