Virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.

There is a fundamental question we all have to face. How are we to live our lives; by what principles and moral values will we be guided and inspired?

Then not only custom, but also nature affirms that to do is more disgraceful than to suffer injustice, and that justice is equality.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

The longer I live, the more I feel that true repose consists in ‚renouncing‘ one’s own self, by which I mean making up one’s mind to admit that there is no importance whatever in being ‚happy‘ or ‚unhappy‘ in the usual meaning of the words.

Faith consists in believing when it is beyond the power of reason to believe.

Just as a candle cannot burn without fire, men cannot live without a spiritual life.

To go beyond is as wrong as to fall short.

We might come closer to balancing the Budget if all of us lived closer to the Commandments and the Golden Rule.

A novel is never anything, but a philosophy put into images.

The existentialist says at once that man is anguish.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

I argue thee that love is life. And life hath immortality.

How shall I lose the sin, yet keep the sense, and love the offender, yet detest the offence?

Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity.

The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.

Death is the wish of some, the relief of many, and the end of all.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered?

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Silence is the mother of truth.

I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbours as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts.

The impossible often has a kind of integrity which the merely improbable lacks.

Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so.

To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.

My theory is 98 percent of all human endeavor is killing time.

The foolish man conceives the idea of ‚self.‘ The wise man sees there is no ground on which to build the idea of ‚self;‘ thus, he has a right conception of the world and well concludes that all compounds amassed by sorrow will be dissolved again, but the truth will remain.

The brain is wider than the sky.

The way of fortune is like the milkyway in the sky; which is a number of small stars, not seen asunder, but giving light together: so it is a number of little and scarce discerned virtues, or rather faculties and customs, that make men fortunate.

It is as hard and severe a thing to be a true politician as to be truly moral.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

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.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

A man dies when he refuses to stand up for that which is right. A man dies when he refuses to stand up for justice. A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.

States should have the right to enact laws… particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.

Faced with what is right, to leave it undone shows a lack of courage.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Man lives freely only by his readiness to die, if need be, at the hands of his brother, never by killing him.

Plato was a bore.

He that does good to another does good also to himself.

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

Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Ought we not to ask the media to agree among themselves a voluntary code of conduct, under which they would not say or show anything which could assist the terrorists‘ morale or their cause while the hijack lasted.

Nature does nothing in vain.

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

If you do things, whether it’s acting or music or painting, do it without fear – that’s my philosophy. Because nobody can arrest you and put you in jail if you paint badly, so there’s nothing to lose.

Nothing cannot exist forever.

The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.

Man’s unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

How can one preach goodness and love to men without at the same time offering them an interpretation of the World that justifies this goodness and this love?