I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for perfection is God's business.

The more I expect, the more unhappy I am going to be. The more I accept, the more serene I am.

Zoos are becoming facsimiles - or perhaps caricatures - of how animals once were in their natural habitat. If the right policies toward nature were pursued, we would need no zoos at all.

Acceptance doesn't mean resignation; it means understanding that something is what it is and that there's got to be a way through it.

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.

Our challenges don’t define us, our actions do.

If you fixate on the worst-case scenario and it actually happens, you’ve lived it twice.

Family is not an important thing. It's everything.

I like to encourage people to realize that any action is a good action if it's proactive and there is positive intent behind it.

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.

A failure is always in the passenger seat in his or her life.

Look to the past to help create the future. Look to science and to poetry. Combine innovation and interpretation. We need the best of both. And it is universities that best provide them.

Be positive. Believe that you will succeed. See it, go for it. No matter what the odds, most of the battle is inside your own head. -- Bob Mayer

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.

The man who cannot obey God cannot say that he loves or trusts his Master. If God knows best then how dare we interfere with His will?

It is a writer's greatest pleasure to hear that someone was kept up until the unholy hours of the morning reading one of their books

We spend so much time condemning, critiquing, and copying culture we miss on actually changing it. Be a creator not a hater.

If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.

When I'm working, I don't wake up and say, 'OK, time to go be intense.' I just look at whatever scenes we're working on that day and break them down - just real intense everyday work.

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died All Nature was degraded; The King dropped a tear in the Queen's ear, And all his pictures faded.