Simon Barnes quotes:

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."

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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