“Never call anyone a baboon unless you are sure of your facts.”

“He had also learned that there is no use murdering people; there are always so many left, and if you tried to murder them all you would never get anything else done.”

“We all make mistakes, but intelligence enables us to do it on purpose.”

“Intelligence is the capacity to know what we are doing and instinct is just instinct. The results are about the same.”

“Would it not be downright cruel to keep him in semi-captivity in a town or city, where the opportunities for wreaking havoc and destruction upon the landscape are necessarily so limited? In a word,...”

“The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.”

“It's true,' Mathilde said after some time, 'I could breathe fire.'She thought of how Lotto, in later years, had been called the lion. With his dander up, he could roar. He looked leonine too, his c...”

“It is no accident that the photographer becomes a photographer any more than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer.”

“Do I believe in arbitration? I do. But not in arbitration between the lion and the lamb, in which the lamb is in the morning found inside the lion.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”