Simon Barnes Quotes

• 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

  Future, Thinking, Years

  45 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Sports, Lying, Doe

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Ambition, Self, Comfort

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Dresses, Green, Chips

  4 Copy quote

• Behind every footballing tough guy there lurks a mincing aesthete with a love of art for art's sake, football for football's sake. A win without art is somehow less than a victory; less, almost, than a beautiful defeat. In football, the romantic and the pragmatist are ever at war in the same breast. Beauty, it must be understood here, is not Barcelona's aim but their method. And last night they were ready to use this method at every opportunity - quick-fire passing of wit and purpose in the danger areas, seeking always to produce an unlooked-for player in a position of threat.

  Simon Barnes

  Beautiful, Soccer, Football

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Winning, Ashes, Eccentric

  7 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Wish, Trying, Dragonflies

  64 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Nature, Giving, Bird

  19 Copy quote

• 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

  Nature, Luxury, Pockets

  7 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse, Mind Love, World

  62 Copy quote

• Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.

  Simon Barnes

  Beautiful, Wonderful Nature, Horrible

  Simon Barnes (2011). “How to be a Bad Birdwatcher: To the Greater Glory of Life”, p.86, Short Books

  4 Copy quote

• There was an advert I rather liked. Devastated woman: "I've just seen the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse!" Husband: "Never mind, love, it's not the end of the world."

  Simon Barnes

  Funny, Clever, Husband

  5 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Meaningful, Nature, People

  4 Copy quote

• Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.

  Simon Barnes

  Couple, Believe, Years

  Simon Barnes (2008). “How to be Wild”, p.39, Short Books

  6 Copy quote

• There are three great international team sports in Australia: cricket, rugby (two codes), and Pom-bashing. But the greatest of these is the last, and it is time we prepared ourselves for the greatest celebration of Pom-bashing since Bodyline, the 1930s cricket tour that became an international incident. That one rankles to this day and is otherwise known as the longest whinge in sporting history.

  Simon Barnes

  Sports, Team, Two

  4 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Football, Drama, People

  4 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Truism

  4 Copy quote

• The combination of an out-of-control tabloid press and a readership that thrills to the destruction of the England head coach is something no other country can offer. Scolari was driven out; Steve McClaren's personal life made the front pages. Neither of them even held the job. Then there was the fake-sheikhing of Sven-Göran Eriksson. That a newspaper should so brilliantly and deliberately destabilise the national head coach in a World Cup year is something no other sporting nation would consider.

  Simon Barnes

  Soccer, Football, Country

  4 Copy quote

• Sven must have neglected to pay tribute to one of those strict Nordic gods. But instead of cursing Eriksson himself, Thor has done a still crueller thing and cursed the England strikers. I can only assume that Eriksson was never informed of this curse, otherwise he might have more than a 17-year-old up his sleeve.

  Simon Barnes

  Soccer, Football, Years

  4 Copy quote

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

  Simon Barnes

  Nature, Enjoy Life, Bird

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Soccer, Football, Analysis

  4 Copy quote

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