| Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in. | |
| Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny. | |
| To appreciate the beauty of a snow flake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold. | |
| He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader. | |
| The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either. | |
| Courage is the first virtue that makes all other virtues possible. | |
| Laughter is a bodily exercise, precious to Health | |
| Greatness of spirit is accompanied by simplicity and sincerity. | |
| Life is only meaningful when we are striving for a goal . | |
| The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. | |
| Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. | |
| The more you know, the more you know you don't know. | |
| 95% of everything you do is the result of habit. | |
| A tragedy is that moment where the hero comes face to face with his true identity. | |
| Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life. | |
| It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil. | |
| Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit. | |
| Criticism is something we can avoid easily | |
| by saying nothing, doing nothing, | |
| and being nothing. | |
| At the intersection where your gifts, talents, and abilities meet a human need; therein you will discover your purpose | |
| A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything. | |
| Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances. | |
| The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. | |
| The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. | |
| Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god. | |
| True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person. | |
| The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice. | |
| Doubt is the beginning of wisdom | |
| The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes. | |
| Humility is a flower which does not grow in everyone's garden. | |
| The best things are placed between extremes. | |
| Character is determined by choice, not opinion. | |
| Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work. | |
| The worst thing about slavery is that the slaves eventually get to like it. | |
| We can't learn without pain. | |
| Think as the wise men think, but talk like the simple people do. | |
| We are what we repeatedly do... excellence, therefore, isn't just an act, but a habit and life isn't just a series of events, but an ongoing process of self-definition. | |
| Life cannot be lived, and understood, simultaneously. | |
| Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. | |
| The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet. | |
| Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action. | |
| He who has overcome his fears will truly be free. | |
| The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own. | |
| Only an armed people can be truly free. Only an unarmed people can ever be enslaved. | |
| You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. | |
| Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny. | |
| If something's bound to happen, it will | |
| happen.. Right time, right person, and for | |
| the best reason. | |
| Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope. | |
| A friend of everyone is a friend of no one | |
| What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good. | |
| Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy. | |
| It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. | |
| Before you heal the body you must first heal the mind | |
| Character is revealed through action. | |
| Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person. | |
| The high-minded man does not bear grudges, for it is not the mark of a great soul to remember injuries, but to forget them. | |
| The proof that you know something is that you are able to teach it | |
| One may go wrong in many different ways, but right only in one, which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed. | |
| For both excessive and insufficient exercise destroy one's strength, and both eating and drinking too much or too little destroy health, whereas the right quantity produces, increases and preserves it. So it is the same with temperance, courage and the other virtues. This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended. | |
| 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. | |
| Those who are not angry at the things they should be angry at are thought to be fools, and so are those who are not angry in the right way, at the right time, or with the right persons. | |
| When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end. | |
| I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self. | |
| He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. | |
| Today, see if you can stretch your heart and expand your love so that it touches not only those to whom you can give it easily, but also to those who need it so much. | |
| No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. | |
| Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom. | |
| Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave. | |
| The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar. | |
| The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is. | |
| Courage is the mother of all virtues because without it, you cannot consistently perform the others. | |
| Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers. | |
| Character is made by many acts; it may be lost by a single one. | |
| The man who is truly good and wise will bear with dignity whatever fortune sends, and will always make the best of his circumstances. | |
| Find the good. Seek the Unity. Ignore the divisions among us. | |
| The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning. | |
| The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief. | |
| Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime. | |
| The hardest victory is the victory over self. | |
| Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms. | |
| Fortune favours the bold. | |
| You are what you repeatedly do | |
| Your happiness depends on you alone. | |
| Patience s bitter, but it's fruit is sweet. | |
| Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it. | |
| Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact. | |
| The energy of the mind is the essence of life. | |
| The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain. | |
| Our feelings towards our friends reflect our feelings towards ourselves. | |
| They - Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else. | |
| Through discipline comes freedom. | |
| The quality of life is determined by its activities. | |
| What you have to learn to do, you learn by doing. | |
| Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals. | |
| All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established. | |
| A goal gets us motivated,while a good habit keeps us stay motivated. | |
| The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get. | |
| You can never learn anything that you did not already know | |
| There is nothing unequal as the equal treatment of unequals. | |
| Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose. Thus, to give money away is quite a simple task, but for the act to be virtuous, the donor must give to the right person, for the right purpose, in the right amount, in the right manner, and at the right time. | |
| It is a part of probability that many improbable things will happen. | |
| Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach. | |
| We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference. | |
| It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit | |
| Let us first understand the facts and then we may seek the cause. | |
| We laugh at that which we cannot bear to face. | |
| Peace is more difficult than war. | |
| You are what you do repeatedly. | |
| Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God. | |
| The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want. | |
| To Unlearn is as hard as to Learn | |
| Every man should be responsible to others, nor should any one be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed, there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man. | |
| The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society. | |
| Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons. | |
| A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave... The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities - a natural defectiveness. | |
| Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies. | |
| Love well, be loved and do something of value. | |
| Happiness is a state of activity. | |
| Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. | |
| Fine friendship requires duration rather than fitful intensity. | |
| The physician himself, if sick, actually calls in another physician, knowing that he cannot reason correctly if required to judge his own condition while suffering. | |
| Money is a guarantee that we can have what we want in the future | |
| Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers. | |
| The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper. | |
| Happiness belongs to the self sufficient. | |
| Health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance | |
| To love someone is to identify with them. | |
| He overcomes a stout enemy who overcomes his own anger. | |
| All men seek one goal: success or happiness. | |
| Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers. | |
| It is well to be up before daybreak, for such habits contribute to health, wealth, and wisdom. | |
| Philosophy begins with wonder. | |
| Speech is the representation of the mind, and writing is the representation of speech. | |
| Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend. | |
| We should aim rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our means. | |
| At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst. | |
| It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth. | |
| The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse. | |
| A promise made must be a promise kept. | |
| Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader. | |
| Nature creates nothing without a purpose. | |
| There are no experienced young people. Time makes experience. | |
| Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your vocation. | |
| The man who is content to live alone is either a beast or a god. | |
| The soul suffers when the body is diseased or traumatized, while the body suffers when the soul is ailing. | |
| Fate of empires depends on the education of youth | |
| Obstinate people can be divided into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish. | |
| All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind. | |
| The ideal man is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy. | |
| Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms. | |
| A gentleman is not disturbed by anything | |
| He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly worthless. | |
| It is not sufficient to know what one ought to say, but one must also know how to say it. | |
| Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, therein lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake up calls to your true vocation in life... to ignore this, is in some sense, is to lose your soul. | |
| The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children. | |
| Hope is a waking dream. | |
| It is better for a city to be governed by a good man than by good laws. | |
| Men become richer not only by increasing their existing wealth but also by decreasing their expenditure. | |
| All friendly feelings toward others come from the friendly feelings a person has for himself. | |
| Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved. | |
| It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement. | |
| The end of labor is to gain leisure. | |
| The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else. | |
| Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages. | |
| A democracy exists whenever those who are free and are not well-off, being in the majority, are in sovereign control of government, an oligarchy when control lies with the rich and better-born, these being few. | |
| There is honor in being a dog. | |
| If you see a man approaching with the obvious intent of doing you good, run for your life. | |
| Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come. | |
| God and nature create nothing that does not fulfill a purpose | |
| Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience. | |
| Nature does nothing in vain. | |
| The character which results from wealth is that of a prosperous fool. | |
| Misfortune shows those who are not really friends. | |
| It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. | |
| Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind. | |
| Authority is no source for Truth. | |
| People do not naturally become morally excellent or practically wise. They become so, if at all, only as the result of lifelong personal and community effort. | |
| Reason is a light that God has kindled in the soul. | |
| What we expect, that we find. | |
| We are better able to study our neighbours than ourselves, and their actions than our own. | |
| We work to earn our leisure. | |
| Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies. | |
| Female cats are very Lascivious, and make advances to the male. | |
| Wit is well-bred insolence. | |
| Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them. | |
| He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them. | |
| Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time. | |
| If men are given food, but no chastisement nor any work, they become insolent. | |
| Friends are much better tried in bad fortune than in good. | |
| Happiness is the reward of virtue. | |
| It is the characteristic of the magnanimous man to ask no favor but to be ready to do kindness to others. | |
| The senses are gateways to the intelligence. There is nothing in the intelligence which did not first pass through the senses. | |
| We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage. | |
| It is more difficult to organize a peace than to win a war; but the fruits of victory will be lost if the peace is not organized. | |
| What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do. | |
| If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development | |
| If things do not turn out as we wish, we should wish for them as they turn out. | |
| Man is by nature a political animal. | |
| The ultimate end...is not knowledge, but action. To be half right on time may be more important than to obtain the whole truth too late. | |
| The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law. | |
| Saying the words that come from knowledge is no sign of having it. | |
| A friend is another I. | |
| The whole is more than the sum of its parts. | |
| Worthless persons appointed to have supreme control of weighty affairs do a lot of damage. | |
| The habits we form from childhood make no small difference, but rather they make all the difference. | |
| Our characters are the result of our conduct. | |
| The soul never thinks without a picture. | |
| Perception starts with the eye. | |
| There's many a slip between the cup and the lip. | |
| The greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. | |
| Men are marked from the moment of birth to rule or be ruled. | |
| My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake. | |
| To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true. | |
| We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends behave to us | |
| Happiness does not consist in pastimes and amusements but in virtuous activities. | |
| Truth is a remarkable thing. We cannot miss knowing some of it. But we cannot know it entirely. | |
| 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. | |
| Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil. | |
| We are what we do. | |
| Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. | |
| He who hath many friends hath none. | |
| No state will be well administered unless the middle class holds sway. | |
| By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents | |
| The honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action. | |
| Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. | |
| Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. | |
| No one loves the man whom he fears. | |
| Now the greatest external good we should assume to be the thing which we offer as a tribute to the gods, and which is most coveted by men of high station, and is the prize awarded for the noblest deeds; and such a thing is honor, for honor is clearly the greatest of external goods. | |
| For what one has to learn to do, we learn by doing. | |
| Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot. | |
| It is no easy task to be good. | |
| Nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for. | |
| Worms are the intestines of the earth. | |
| True happiness flows from the possession of wisdom and virtue and not from the possession of external goods. | |
| The hand is the tool of tools. | |
| Friends enhance our ability to think and act. | |
| We are what we frequently do. | |
| A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side. | |
| Beauty is the gift of God | |
| 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. | |
| Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish. | |
| To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man. | |
| Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honour than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life. | |
| Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural. | |
| The complete man must work, study and wrestle. | |
| The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life - knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live. | |
| Well begun is half done. | |
| Even that some people try deceived me many times ... I will not fail to believe that somewhere, someone deserves my trust. | |
| A person's life persuades better than his word. | |
| All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there�s too much corruption in the world | |
| For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all; since armed injustice is the more dangerous, and he is equipped at birth with the arms of intelligence and with moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. Wherefore, if he have not virtue, he is the most unholy and the most savage of animals, and the most full of lust and gluttony. But justice is the bond of men in states, and the administration of justice, which is the determination of what is just, is the principle of order in political society. | |
| A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies. | |
| Being a father is the most rewarding thing a man whose career has plateaued can do. | |
| It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences. | |
| Maybe crying is a means of cleaning yourself out emotionally. Or maybe it's your last resort; the only way to express yourself when words fail, the same as when you were a baby and had no words. | |
| Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities. | |
| Nature does nothing in vain. Therefore, it is imperative for persons to act in accordance with their nature and develop their latent talents, in order to be content and complete. | |
| The ideal man takes joy in doing favors for others. | |
| 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. | |
| Try is a noisy way of doing nothing. | |
| Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking. | |
| He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude. | |
| A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few. | |
| One thing alone not even God can do,To make undone whatever hath been done. | |
| Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come. | |
| You should never think without an image. | |
| The actuality of thought is life. | |
| Gentleness is the ability to bear reproaches and slights with moderation, and not to embark on revenge quickly, and not to be easily provoked to anger, but be free from bitterness and contentiousness, having tranquility and stability in the spirit. | |
| The greatest victory is over self. | |
| Wickedness is nourished by lust. | |
| Intuition is the source of scientific knowledge. | |
| All proofs rest on premises. | |
| Friends are an aid to the young, to guard them from error; to the elderly, to attend to their wants and to supplement their failing power of action; to those in the prime of life, to assist them to noble deeds. | |
| When you feel yourself lacking something, send your thoughts towards your Intimate and search for the Divinity that lives within you. | |
| When...we, as individuals, obey laws that direct us to behave for the welfare of the community as a whole, we are indirectly helping to promote the pursuit of happiness by our fellow human beings. | |
| Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity. | |
| Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life. | |
| Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic? | |
| Goodness is to do good to the deserving and love the good and hate the wicked, and not to be eager to inflict punishment or take vengeance, but to be gracious and kindly and forgiving. | |
| For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first. | |
| The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants. | |
| Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good. | |
| Liars when they speak the truth are not believed. | |
| Happiness involves engagement in activities that promote one's highest potentials. | |
| The Life of the intellect is the best and pleasantest for man, because the intellect more than anything else is the man. Thus it will be the happiest life as well. | |
| Music directly imitates the passions or states of the soul...when one listens to music that imitates a certain passion, he becomes imbued withthe same passion; and if over a long time he habitually listens to music that rouses ignoble passions, his whole character will be shaped to an ignoble form. | |
| We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace. | |
| Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else. | |
| There is no genius who hasn't a touch of insanity. | |
| We must be neither cowardly nor rash but courageous. | |
| Memory is the scribe of the soul. | |
| Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it. | |
| The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest. | |
| Why do men seek honour? Surely in order to confirm the favorable opinion they have formed of themselves. | |
| Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment. The same thing is true in every case of the kind: wine and all fluids that evaporate and condense back into a liquid state become water. They all are water modified by a certain admixture, the nature of which determines their flavour. | |
| To give away money is an easy matter and in any man's power. But to decide to whom to give it and how large and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy matter. | |
| Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers. | |
| Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own. | |
| Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, . . Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. | |
| A flatterer is a friend who is your inferior, or pretends to be so. | |
| That which is excellent endures. | |
| The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. | |
| A man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest faculties. | |
| For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve. | |
| Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody. | |
| 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. | |
| Law is mind without reason. | |
| Those who act receive the prizes. | |
| Suppose, then, that all men were sick or deranged, save one or two of them who were healthy and of right mind. It would then be the latter two who would be thought to be sick and deranged and the former not! | |
| That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable. | |
| A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return. | |
| We are what we continually do. | |
| Character is that which reveals moral purpose, exposing the class of things a man chooses and avoids. | |
| Education and morals make the good man, the good statesman, the good ruler. | |
| The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine. | |
| Happiness is a certain activity of soul in conformity with perfect goodness | |
| Revolutions are effected in two ways, by force and by fraud. | |
| What soon grows old? Gratitude. | |
| Education and morals will be found almost the whole that goes to make a good man. | |
| Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws. | |
| Wonder implies the desire to learn. | |
| Bad men are full of repentance. | |
| Every man should be responsible to others, nor should anyone be allowed to do just as he pleases; for where absolute freedom is allowed there is nothing to restrain the evil which is inherent in every man. But the principle of responsibility secures that which is the greatest good in states; the right persons rule and are prevented from doing wrong, and the people have their due. It is evident that this is the best kind of democracy, and why? because the people are drawn from a certain class. | |
| It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize. | |
| When you ask a dumb question, you get a smart answer. | |
| It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world. | |
| The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist. | |
| The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning. | |
| Men are divided between those who are as thrifty as if they would live forever, and those who are as extravagant as if they were going to die the next day. | |
| There are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity, and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things. | |
| The soul becomes prudent by sitting and being quiet. | |
| Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age. | |
| Nothing is what rocks dream about | |
| The aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought....The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful. | |
| The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold. | |
| There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is. | |
| The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend. | |
| Happiness is the utilization of one's talents along lines of excellence. | |
| It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. | |
| In educating the young we steer them by the rudders of pleasure and pain | |
| PLOT is CHARACTER revealed by ACTION. | |
| Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit. | |
| For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. | |
| Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means. | |
| 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. | |
| Even the best of men in authority are liable to be corrupted by passion. We may conclude then that the law is reason without passion, and it is therefore preferable to any individual. | |
| Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty-no. | |
| The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. | |
| Thinking is different from perceiving and is held to be in part imagination, in part judgment | |
| The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival. | |
| Philosophy can make people sick. | |
| Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide. | |
| It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims. | |
| The saying of Protagoras is like the views we have mentioned; he said that man is the measure of all things, meaning simply that that which seems to each man assuredly is. If this is so, it follows that the same thing both is and is not, and is bad and good, and that the contents of all other opposite statements are true, because often a particular thing appears beautiful to some and ugly to others, and that which appears to each man is the measure | |
| The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime; for one swallow does not a summer make. | |
| The intention makes the crime. | |
| Democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy. For in oligarchies there is the double danger of the oligarchs falling out among themselves and also with the people; but in democracies there is only the danger of a quarrel with the oligarchs. No dissension worth mentioning arises among the people themselves. And we may further remark that a government which is composed of the middle class more nearly approximates to democracy than to oligarchy, and is the safest of the imperfect forms of government. | |
| One who faces and who fears the right things and from the right motive, in the right way and at the right time, posseses character worthy of our trust and admiration. | |
| Civil confusions often spring from trifles but decide great issues. | |
| Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness. | |
| The brave man, if he be compared with the coward, seems foolhardy; and, if with the foolhardy man, seems a coward. | |
| How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms | |
| A true disciple shows his appreciation by reaching further than his teacher. | |
| Youth loves honor and victory more than money. | |
| Education is the best provision for old age. | |
| All men by nature desire knowledge. | |
| Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life. | |
| The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication. | |
| But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just? | |
| All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. | |
| Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were. | |
| Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character ofthe speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself. | |
| A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed. | |
| The Eyes are the organs of temptation, and the Ears are the organs of instruction. | |
| Accordingly, the poet should prefer probable impossibilities to improbable possibilities. The tragic plot must not be composed of irrational parts. | |
| To be angry is easy. But to be angry with the right man at the right time and in the right manner, that is not easy. | |
| Definition of tragedy: A hero destroyed by the excess of his virtues | |
| Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal. | |
| The law is reason unaffected by desire. | |
| Happiness comes from theperfect practice of virtue. | |
| Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked. | |
| The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons. | |
| Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing. | |
| The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. |