What makes a man a ‘sophist’ is not his faculty, but his moral purpose.
Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your calling.
Through discipline comes freedom.
Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.
And it is a characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes a family and a state.
A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
It is their character indeed that makes people who they are. But it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse.
First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.
It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.
Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
Happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves. The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.
It is also in the interests of the tyrant to make his subjects poor… the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
Jealousy is both reasonable and belongs to reasonable men, while envy is base and belongs to the base, for the one makes himself get good things by jealousy, while the other does not allow his neighbour to have them through envy.
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been.
Good character is the indispensable condition and chief determinant of happiness, itself the goal of all human doing. The end of all action, individual or collective, is the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
They who love in excess also hate in excess.
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.
Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship.
Fame means being respected by everybody, or having some quality that is desired by all men, or by most, or by the good, or by the wise.
Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers.
The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement. If Eudaimonia, or happiness, is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence; and this will be that of the best thing in us.
To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.
The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.
Yes the truth is that men’s ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.
It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom.
The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.
Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society.
Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.
A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend’s existence…makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.
Bad people…are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Happiness is a state of activity.
In a practical syllogism, the major premise is an opinion, while the minor premise deals with particular things, which are the province of perception. Now when the two premises are combined, just as in theoretic reasoning the mind is compelled to affirm the resulting conclusion, so in the case of practical premises you are forced at once to do it.
No one loves the man whom he fears.
Rhetoric was to be surveyed from the standpoint of philosophy.
The gods too are fond of a joke.
The secret to humor is surprise.
