Simon Barnes > Quotes

“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 , How to Be Wild

“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

“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, How to Be a Bad Birdwatcher

“Nature is not horrible. Nature is not wonderful. Nature is not cruel. Nature is not beautiful. Nature only is.”
― Simon Barnes

“We’re not just losing the wild world. We’re forgetting it. We’re no longer noticing it. We’ve lost the habit of looking and seeing and listening and hearing. We’re beginning to think it’s not really our business. We’re beginning to act as if it’s not there any more.”
― Simon Barnes, Rewild Yourself: Making Nature More Visible in Our Lives

“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, Ten Million Aliens: A Journey Through the Entire Animal Kingdom

“I am a bad birdwatcher.

On the other hand, and taking one thing with another, when it comes to enjoying birds I am world-class.”
― Simon Barnes, How to Be a (Bad) Birdwatcher

“Persuading your brain to become a little wilder is like trying to persuade a starving man to take a snack.”
― Simon Barnes, Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways to Make Nature More Visible

“stationary”
― Simon Barnes, Venetia

“The wildness that comes in the waiting. In the sitting.”
― Simon Barnes, Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways To Make Nature More Visible

“We can’t distinguish between male and female blue tits by sight: blue tits can because the male possesses an ultraviolet crest. Such a bird would find our three-coloured televisions incomprehensibly drab.)”
― Simon Barnes, Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways to Make Nature More Visible

“Sport is already in perspective. I don’t claim any privileged insight in saying this: everybody in the world who watches sport has sport in perspective. If sport wasn’t in perspective it would be meaningless. Sport is not supposed to be real life: it is something quite different. And real life and sport don’t sit well together. After September 11, 2001, sport was suspended in Britain for the weekend, and rightly. Not just as a tribute to the dead, for all that they cared, but because we just weren’t in the mood for it. Real life was simply too pressing. But come the following weekend, sport was back and welcomed. We were now ready to be cheered up.”
― Simon Barnes, The Meaning of Sport

“THE MAGIC TREE Everyone in that crowd turned its head, and then everyone drew a long breath of wonder and delight. A little way off, towering over their heads, they saw a tree which certainly had not been there before. – The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis”
― Simon Barnes, Rewild Yourself: 23 Spellbinding Ways to Make Nature More Visible