With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there's a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge's plucky, glass-half-full meditation or,...
Some people are natural beauties, some have great style, but sometimes it comes from talent. Take Kate Winslet: I was listening to her speech at the Golden Globes. That woman has so much intensity. She's amazing to watch and to listen to. With some p...
We come from fallible parents who were kids once, who decided to have kids and who had to learn how to be parents. Faults are made and damage is done, whether it's conscious or not. Everyone's got their own 'stuff,' their own issues, and their own an...
If there are a couple of adjectives people use to describe me, anger is usually in there. I've never taken that as criticism. It's the way I naturally communicate. But I'm not faux-angry, like Lewis Black, or angry like a gun-toting crazy person. I'm...
There's a snobbery at work in architecture. The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it's an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economi...
I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms ...
Art owes its origin to Nature herself... this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may ve...
Art and activism seem to go together naturally, the idea being that if you're an entertainer, you can have a voice, and if you have a voice, you can make a difference. But if I were not an actress, I would still try to extend myself beyond my little ...
Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile a...
The loss of these tastes [for poetry and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
Most of my life has been spent keeping information close, turning it over and over in my mind. The impulse to share anything is a new one, the impulse to hide as natural as breathing.
Keep close to Nature's heart, yourself; and break clear away, once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean... [John Muir to Samuel Hall Young]
I suppose that Willie had his natural quota of ordinary suspicion and caginess, but those things tend to evaporate when what people tell you is what you want to hear.
Far from seeking to justify, as does the Church, the necessity of torments and afflictions, he cried, in his outraged pity: 'If a God has made this world, I should not wish to be that God. The world's wretchedness would rend my heart.
Nature seems to welcome defiance of conventions, and to say, with a smile, 'So, the truant has come back again!' ("Absolute Evil")
Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.
We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.
All integral laws of spectral lines and of atomic theory spring originally from the quantum theory. It is the mysterious organon on which Nature plays her music of the spectra, and according to the rhythm of which she regulates the structure of the a...
I am one whose faith is, that love and friendship, with ardent natures, are like those trees of the torrid zone which yield fruit but once, and then die.
Refrain to-night; And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence, the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature, And either master the devil or throw him out With wondrous potency.
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief'... is the most natural and most human and most agonizing prayer in the gospels, and I think it is the foundation prayer of faith.
