Simon Barnes Quotes

#1. The comfort zone is always the most desirable place to be. But in settling for comfort, there is a price to pay and it comes in the death of ambition, of hope, of youth and the death of self.

Simon Barnes

#2. The traditional dress of the Australian cricketer is the baggy green cap on the head and the chip on the shoulder. Both are ritualistically assumed

Simon Barnes

#3. I don't go birdwatching. I am birdwatching. Birdwatching is a state of being, not an activity. It doesn't depend on place, on equipment, on specific purpose, like, say, fishing. It is not a matter of organic trainspotting; it is about life and it is about living.

Simon Barnes

#4. Sport is something that does not matter, but is performed as if it did. In that contradiction lies its beauty

Simon Barnes

#5. Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

Simon Barnes

#6. Everybody loves birdsong. It's a human need ... the sound of birds gives a deep, if sometimes almost unnoticed, pleasure

Simon Barnes

#7. Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.

Simon Barnes

#8. Football is based on desperation. All clubs are desperate in one form or another - desperate to succeed, desperate to survive, desperate to stay where they are, desperate that things get no worse, desperate to arrest the slide.

Simon Barnes

#9. It is a truism that no row is ever about what it is about.

Simon Barnes

#10. An innings of neurotic violence, of eccentric watchfulness, of brainless impetuosity and incontinent savagery - it was an extraordinary innings, a masterpiece and it secured the Ashes for England [on Pietersen's Ashes winning innings, 2005

Simon Barnes

#11. We can only truly be civilised people when we have regular and meaningful contact with the wild world

Simon Barnes

#12. If you are old and you wish to be young again, if only for a moment, try and identify a dragonfly.

Simon Barnes

#13. We share a common ancestor with chimps that is not shared by mandrills, we share a common ancestor with mandrills that is not shared by bushbabies, and on and on and on, to the ancestor we share with nematode worms that is not shared with oak trees.

Simon Barnes

#14. Acquiring the trick of listening to birds will teach you how better to enjoy life and how better to endure it

Simon Barnes

#15. What politician ever thinks beyond 4 or 5 years? But such thinking is hopelessly inadequate for the big questions that involve the fabric of the world we live in

Simon Barnes

#16. Never mind, love, it's not the end of the world.

Simon Barnes

#17. A living countryside is not a luxury but a necessity for the human population; if you let conservation go hang until your pockets are jingling there will be a lot less to conserve

Simon Barnes