Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

I never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun.

The experience of democracy is like the experience of life itself-always changing, infinite in its variety, sometimes turbulent and all the more valuable for having been tested by adversity.

There is not a more unhappy being than a superannuated idol.

Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world.

Conscience is a man’s compass.

It is the superfluous things for which men sweat, – superfluous things that wear our togas theadbare, that force us to grow old in camp, that dash us upon foreign shores.

Whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.

What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself in man.

The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I’m on course, and I’m doing what God wants me to do. I’m real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

I love Notting Hill and Westbourne Grove – there is so much life and vitality around Portobello and Ladbroke Grove. It has come up a lot since I started Virgin more than 40 years ago, but there is so much character.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is.

We’re all caught up in circumstances, and we’re all good and evil. When you’re really hungry, for instance, you’ll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing – well, maybe that’s too strong – but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

The first forty years of life give us the text; the next thirty supply the commentary on it.

Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

There’s no tragedy in life like the death of a child. Things never get back to the way they were.

Truths and roses have thorns about them.

As pessimistic as I am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and laziness and inertia, and all those things, I think we can transcend all that and set things straight.

An act has no ethical quality whatever unless it be chosen out of several all equally possible.

The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.

Think of all the beauty still left around you and be happy.

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.

Giving up cannot be an option.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.

Life comes with many challenges. The ones that should not scare us are the ones we can take on and take control of.

‚Tis better to bear the ills we have than fly to others that we know not of.

Our life is frittered away by detail… simplify, simplify.

If I think more about death than some other people, it is probably because I love life more than they do.

All philosophy lies in two words, sustain and abstain.

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

Act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world.

Without gambling, I would not exist.

There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.

He would make a lovely corpse.

Art is the proper task of life.

The difficulties you meet will resolve themselves as you advance. Proceed, and light will dawn, and shine with increasing clearness on your path.

It is perfectly possible to live a very moral life without a belief in God, and I think it’s perfectly possible to live a life peppered with ill-doing and believe in God.

Wisdom does not show itself so much in precept as in life – in firmness of mind and a mastery of appetite. It teaches us to do as well as to talk; and to make our words and actions all of a color.

I don’t have any stress. I’m very lucky. I live a very healthy life.

Worthless people live only to eat and drink; people of worth eat and drink only to live.

The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom… in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

I don’t think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead.

Forever is composed of nows.

Everything passes. Nobody gets anything for keeps. And that’s how we’ve got to live.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice, which the more a man’s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

If you lose a big fight, it will worry you all of your life. It will plague you – until you get your revenge.

Man is made by his belief. As he believes, so he is.

Never elated when someone’s oppressed, never dejected when another one’s blessed.

They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.