Unless you're living on the street and surviving on a diet of discarded turkey drumsticks there's no point in being gloomy. We've spent too long trying to cheer ourselves up by spending money on brightly coloured things we don't really need. We've stopped using our imaginations.

Environmental concern is a little like dieting or paying off credit-card debt - an episodically terrific idea that burns brightly and then seems to fade when we realize there's a reason we need to diet or pay down our debt. The reason is that it's really really hard and too many of us in too many spheres of life choose the easy over the hard.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities - because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities... because it is the quality which guarantees all others.

Editing yourself is like an irksome coin toss. You've got to strip yourself of super ego and operate from the id. Maybe I've got my Freud mixed up. It's just hard to trade a beauty shot for the performance with truth and a brightly lit zit.

Every art and every inquiry and similarly every action and choice is thought to aim at some good and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone and that I have no one to tell it to.

India saw from the beginning and even in her ages of reason and her age of increasing ignorance she never lost hold of the insight that life cannot be rightly seen in the sole light cannot be perfectly lived in the sole power of its externalities.