“If you chuck away too many things, you end up discovering there was value in them.”

There’s nothing like a jolly good disaster to get people to start doing something.

You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.

This was one of those special occasions when I could actually feel the inner appreciation of the beauty of the moment passing like an electric current through the brush in my hand.

One of the main reasons for the conflict in Syria, and the terrorism that it’s spawned, is climate change and drought.

I think we’re going to find, with climate change and everything else, things like global warming and goodness knows what else and the cost of fuel for a start, that things are going to become very complicated.

I think we’d be very foolish to expect that we can just import everything from somewhere else and imagine that that’s going to last for ever and ever and ever.

I sometimes wonder if two thirds of the globe is covered in red carpet.

Do you seriously expect me to be the first Prince of Wales in history not to have a mistress?

I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.

As technology advances at an alarming pace, the place of drawing remains as valid as ever in the creation of art and architecture.

The demand for organic food is growing at a remarkable rate. Consumers have made it clear that they want organic produce and every sector of the food chain is responding, with the kind of results we have just seen.

A jostling scrum of office buildings so mediocre that the only way you ever remember them is by the frustration they induce – like a basketball team standing shoulder to shoulder between you and the Mona Lisa.

The price of apparently cheap food is costing nothing less than the Earth!

There is no doubt that we live in an age of unprecedented, and sometimes terrifying, technological advance where the speed of advance so often outstrips the necessary ethical considerations.

To avert disaster, we have not only to teach men to make things but to teach them to have complete moral control over what they make.

Forests are the world’s air-conditioning system-the lungs of the planet-and we are on the verge of switching it off.

A man sooner or later discovers that he is the master gardener of his soul, the director of his life.

Such is the conscious master, and man can only thus become by discovering within himself the laws of thought; which discovery is totally a matter of application, self-analysis, and experience.

Roots exposed completely vulnerable, stand in bareness see what’s discoverable.

The parts she had buried away were never lost just patiently waiting to be unearthed.

The greatest astonishment of my life was the discovery that the man who does the work is not the man who gets rich.

Modern man is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets, and his hidden truth; he is a man who tries to invest himself.

The ‘Enlightenment, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

To know how to wonder and question is the first step of the mind toward discovery.