"I do not judge the universe." "If you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito." "Awesome is loud but awe is quiet."
Two of these quotes are from his holiness the Dali Lama and the other is from my own DIY spiritual deity, Kevin McCloud, the man who fronts Channel 4's Grand Designs.
Whether snarling at some idiot playboy who thought it a wise idea to build a seven-floored glass beach house in Margate, or openly deriding the use of cut flint as a decorative effect for a fort made out of mud and dung in Nottinghamshire, McCloud wafts this show with a presenting style that is part Henry VIII and part doom-mongering party wall surveyor.
The man, in my eyes, is a God. A God with a laser-powered spirit level. I can't tell you precisely when I realised I had a full-blown, howl at the moon, write-his-name-in-Tip-Ex-on-my-backpack man-crush on McCloud as it was more of slow burn. I guess you could say his love crept up on me like rising damp. Every episode, there he is on some street, some muddy field or building site, trust up against the lashing elements like an urbane arts correspondent who's somehow wondered onto the set of Emmerdale.
Yes, of course he looks all manly and authoritative in a hardhat and brown Rigger boots - he is nothing if not the Tom Hardy of the home improvement genre - yet it's his civilian clothes, McCloud's own personal TV wardrobe, that has me wolf whistling at the black box like a pack of paint-splattered Polish builders on their fag break.
Middle-aged men on television, as I'm sure you have noticed, can go one of two ways sartorially: there are those, such as Jeremy Clarkson, who combine boot cut dad jeans with leather and alcoholism, and then there's someone like Simon Cowell, who is all open white shirt to his navel and skin as tight as Rod Stewart at a charity auction. McCloud seems to rise above all of their failings, neither willfully rejecting style, nor embracing it like a hormonal teenager out to get their cherry popped.
Blue, for McCloud at least, is the warmest colour: navy jacket, navy linen scarf, narrow blue denim jeans and, yes, if they're filming in winter, blue fingers. He dresses, appropriately enough, like the North London architect you always wanted to become.
I plan to send my blueprint for a loft extension made from Gorrilla skin and brushed zinc directly to Channel 4, if anything to try and entice McCloud round to mine. He'll laugh, point and tell me what an utter fool I've been to spend £750, 000 (over budget!) on a staircase made from the Kaercher-ed bones of several hundred dead puppies. Will I care? Not a chance. Because he'll be home. With me. In a high-viz jacket.
