“Consider the Lichen. Lichens are just about the hardiest visible organisms on Earth, but the least ambitious.”

You don’t have to know anything about baseball to respond to Babe Ruth because he’s just this magnificent human being.

So here I am, my affections torn between a postal service that never feeds me but can tackle a challenge and one that gives me free tape and prompt service but won’t help me out when I can’t remember a street name.

We may be all there is. It’s an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe’s supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.

Physicists are atoms’ way of thinking about atoms.

Most of the time I am sunk in thought, but at some point on each walk there comes a moment when I look up and notice, with a kind of first-time astonishment.

It had no practical application in his lifetime, but today, thanks to computers, is routinely used in the modelling of climate change, astrophysics and stock-market analysis.

But what is life to a lichen ? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on.

Columbus real achievement was managing to cross the ocean successfully in both directions. Though an accomplished enough mariner, he was not terribly good at a great deal else, especially geography, the skill that would seem most vital in an explorer.

People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolour left in the rain.

… it occurred to me that never again would he be seven years, one month and six days old, so we had better catch these moments while we can.

A cough so robust that I tapped into two new seams of phlegm.

Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days – that’s walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls – adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

But here’s an extrememly salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is.

On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well,

The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.

All the things that are part of your heritage make you British – that makes this country what it is. It’s part of your history. And here, unlike America, it’s still living history.

Everyone who knew [Barack] Obama from being in Hyde Park knew he was the smartest guy in any room he walked into; a decent, compassionate, lovely person; pragmatic, middle-of-the-road and ambitious.

I was freakishly ambitious. I didn’t want to be a child. I wanted my own flat, to work and be a grown up.

For years, more women were steered toward the studio or toward being a reporter. If that’s what you want to do and that’s what you love – by all means, go do it. That’s OK to be ambitious and do things that are out of the norm if that’s the route you want to take.

I’ve always liked working really hard and then doing nothing in particular. So, consequently, I didn’t overexpose myself; I guess I maintained a kind of mystery. I wasn’t ambitious.

Saving our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim, and, equally, in how hard you work to reach your goal.

Among all kinds of Writing, there is none in which Authors are more apt to miscarry than in Works of Humour, as there is none in which they are more ambitious to excel.

When men call women ambitious they mean pushy.

Vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.