May you live your life as if the maxim of your actions were to become universal law.

Faith: not wanting to know what is true.

The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion.

Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell.

The truth is found when men are free to pursue it.

Isn’t it funny how babies laugh a lot? I read a toddler, a young child laughs 300 times a day. The average adult laughs, like, four times a day. God put it in them. He put the laugh in us, but I think sometimes we let life get us down, you know, have bad breaks, and we lose our breaks.

The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency.

Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.

I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.

I feel a distaste for hunting, first because of a kind of Buddhist respect for the unity and sacredness of all life, and also because the pursuit of a hare or chamois strikes me as a kind of ‚escape of energy,‘ that is, the expenditure of our effort in an illusory end, one devoid of profit.

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.

There is a wisdom of the head, and a wisdom of the heart.

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is theoretically possible.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

May be is very well, but Must is the master. It is my duty to show justice without recompense.

I just usually go with my own taste. If I like something, and it happens to be against the law, well, then I might have a problem.

To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.

Who is the wisest man? He who neither knows or wishes for anything else than what happens.

I’ll die a crazy old man!

The world itself is the will to power – and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power – and nothing else!

If life gives you limes, make margaritas.

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

Really showing love requires more than just words.

I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We’ve created life in our own image.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason.

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

Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

Base souls have no faith in great individuals.

Our object in the construction of the state is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class.

Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it.

From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.

Morality is contraband in war.

What do I care about the purring of one who cannot love, like the cat?

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?

Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?

Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions; concupiscence causes voluntary actions, force involuntary ones.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

It is the eye of other people that ruin us. If I were blind I would want, neither fine clothes, fine houses or fine furniture.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

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

The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount.

You’re going to die. You’re going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we’re just going to be gone. The world’s going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself.

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude.

Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

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.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all – the apathy of human beings.

The false is nothing but an imitation of the true.

He does it with better grace, but I do it more natural.

I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying.

Never in any case say I have lost such a thing, but I have returned it. Is your child dead? It is a return. Is your wife dead? It is a return. Are you deprived of your estate? Is not this also a return?

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

Actions are the seed of fate deeds grow into destiny.

Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.

Superstition is the poetry of life.

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.

Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now – always.

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

Ethics and power are separate.