“We commonly say in the trade that the most dangerous animal in a zoo is Man.”

I chose the name Pi because it’s an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet scientists use this irrational number to come to a “rational” understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that, “irrational” yet with it we come together we come to a sound understanding of the universe.

I go to mass every Sunday, but love going to mosques too. Muslims pray in a beautiful way.

He’s a shy man. Life has taught him not to show off what is most precious to him.

To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures who people the tree of your life and give it new branches.

Religion is just an alternate way of reading reality – you read material reality, and then you add on an extra layer of religiosity that deepens that understanding of reality. Some countries have lost that capacity, or dismissed it or marginalized it.

The worst pair of opposites is boredom and terror. Sometimes your life is a pendulum swing from one to the other.

I have read that there are two fears that cannot be trained out of us: the startle reaction upon hearing an unexpected noise, and vertigo.

When you’ve suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling.

I was giving up. I would have given up – if a voice hadn’t made itself heard in my heart. The voice said “I will not die. I refuse it. I will make it through this nightmare.

My greatest wish – other than salvation – was to have a book.

Life will defend itself no matter how small it is.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

Artists invent things as a way of telling the truth.

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers.

Why can’t reason give greater answers? Why can we throw a question further than we can pull in an answer? Why such a vast net if there’s so little fish to catch?

If you don’t let technology help you, if you resist good ideas, you condemn yourself to dinosaurhood.

Advertising is not a rifle; it is a shotgun, and any campaign featuring outdoor boards of a cartoon animal inevitably will catch children in its spray.

For years, they were doing horrible things to animals in the manufacture of cosmetics, and testing of the most barbaric types; today, if you go into a drugstore and go down the [cosmetics] aisle.

Various species of animals react differently to the same drug. Not only do the variations in the metabolism of a drug make it difficult to extrapolate results of animal experiments to man but they create a serious obstacle to the development of new therapeutic drugs.

It is absurd for a man to kill an elephant. It is not brutal, it is not heroic, and certainly it is not easy.

Whether many people realize it yet or not, man, the Inferior Animal, has by now proved himself incapable of keeping his own species – and others – alive for very much longer. So the earth has begun its own plan to set things right.

Animals don’t care what you look like. They care how you love.

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.