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.

Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.

Only a man’s character is the real criterion of worth.

Our heart glows, and secret unrest gnaws at the root of our being. Dealing with the unconscious has become a question of life for us.

I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.

I don’t think so, in that Virgin is already a global brand. Brands like Amazon have had to spend hundreds of millions of pounds you know, building their brands, whereas Virgin is already well-known around the world.

Freedom is never dear at any price. It is the breath of life. What would a man not pay for living?

Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

God will not look you over for medals degrees or diplomas, but for scars.

We think that life develops spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere in the universe. But we don’t know the probability that a planet develops life.

It seems the older you get, the more life comes into focus.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.

This is not a showman’s job. I will not step out of character.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy.

I have known a vast quantity of nonsense talked about bad men not looking you in the face. Don’t trust that conventional idea. Dishonesty will stare honesty out of countenance any day in the week, if there is anything to be got by it.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die.

Every man’s reputation proceeds from those of his own household.

There will always be something to ruin our lives, it all depends on what or which finds us first. We are always ripe and ready to be taken.

It is natural to die as to be born.

Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there’s a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.

Change alone is unchanging.

My life is not unlike Truman’s. I can’t go anywhere.

Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Life is a constant oscillation between the sharp horns of dilemmas.

I suppose, in a way, this has become part of my soul. It is a symbol of my life. Whatever I have done that really matters, I’ve done wearing it. When the time comes, it will be in this that I journey forth. What greater honor could come to an American, and a soldier?

I’m 31 now. I think I’m beginning to understand what life is, what romance is, and what a relationship means.

Life would pall if it were all sugar; salt is bitter if taken by itself; but when tasted as part of the dish, it savours the meat. Difficulties are the salt of life.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

It may be, it just may be, that life as we know it with its humanity is more unique than many have thought.

And were an epitaph to be my story I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

I believe life is an intelligent thing: that things aren’t random.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.

Some desire is necessary to keep life in motion, and he whose real wants are supplied must admit those of fancy.

I can think of nothing less pleasurable than a life devoted to pleasure.

Each life is made up of mistakes and learning, waiting and growing, practicing patience and being persistent.

Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.

Old age is like a plane flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there’s nothing you can do.

Life’s like a play: it’s not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.

Unbeing dead isn’t being alive.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man’s soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls.

Life cannot subsist in society but by reciprocal concessions.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

I can do no other than be reverent before everything that is called life. I can do no other than to have compassion for all that is called life. That is the beginning and the foundation of all ethics.

Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‚What are you doing for others?‘

It is only a man’s own fundamental thoughts that have truth and life in them. For it is these that he really and completely understands. To read the thoughts of others is like taking the remains of someone else’s meal, like putting on the discarded clothes of a stranger.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Our words will either bring life and victory or death and destruction. If we want to be happy, we have to be serious about speaking words of life that line up with God’s Word.

Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top – or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things… Life is one crisis after another.

Absence and death are the same – only that in death there is no suffering.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

Life, if well lived, is long enough.

There are three constants in life… change, choice and principles.