“Reputation matters so much only because people so seldom think for themselves.”

Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.

Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test.

If one felt successful, there’d be so little incentive to be successful.

The media insists on taking what someone didn’t mean to say as being far closer to the truth than what they did.

Man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter – pleasurable, intoxicating, even – with human weakness in the face of strength, age and size of the universe.

Artistic accounts involve severe abbreviations of what reality will force upon us.

It is not just nature that defies us. Human life is as overwhelming… If we spend time in it [the vast spaces of nature], they may help us to accept more graciously the great, unfathomable events that molest our lives and will inevitably return us to dust.

What kills us isn’t one big thing, but thousands of tiny obligations we can’t turn down for fear of disappointing others.

After 40 (old age for most of man’s history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.

Curiosity might be pictured as being made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions.

In the gap between who we wish one day to be and who we are at present, must come pain, anxiety, envy and humiliation.

Every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver – because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly.

We may seek a fortune for no greater reason than to secure the respect and attention of people who would otherwise look straight through us.

As adults, we try to develop the character traits that would have rescued our parents.

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough.

And, with much of Europe occupied by Nazi Germany, and Mussolini’s armies in Albania.

When you’re tied to one show, you are very much at the mercy of the writers so you can suddenly get a script where you have a heart attack and die.

Here’s Brian Flynn. His official height is five feet five and he doesn’t look much taller than that

Like most of the popular songs are today in the English language that I hear – then it would be much more of a turnoff then if it would allow me to interpret it.

A man obsessed: obsessed with perfection, sharing, aesthetics, taste, savoir-faire, and much more.

A photograph on every mantlepiece. And all this mourning has veiled the truth. It’s not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.

John Moncur has been much more effective since he came on

I dont drive around London much.