Books lined the shelves of bookstores like kids standing in a row to play baseball or soccer, and mine was the gangly, unathletic kid that no one wanted on their team.

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.

You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you, but sometimes I do, and thatsight becomes this art.

Suicide is man's way of telling God, 'You can't fire me - I quit!

I have one criticism about the Negro troops who fought under my command in the Korean War. They didn't send me enough of them.

Tourism is important because it can create sustainable local economies. Id much rather have 1,000 tourists going up the Tambopata than 1,000 gold miners.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

Do no dishonor to the earth lest you dishonor the spirit of man.

Unless it hurts, unless there’s some vulnerability there, I don’t think you’re going to get good photographs.

I'm so close to Heaven, this Hell cannot be mine.

Design cannot precede evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.

Dancing is a very healthy thing to do for our body.