Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled not for its own sake but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

The British political system and the whole clapped out Westminster architecture and the language that we use about politics it's completely unsustainable. You either decide to be part of that transition to do something different. Or you cling to old certainties.

But it seems that the judging maybe they shouldn't at least see the practices all week long. That can taint the way they go into the judging and the outlook of what's going to happen instead of just watching those four minutes and judging on those minutes alone.

To teach how to live without certainty and yet without being paralysed by hesitation is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy in our age can do for those who study it.