Between husband and wife friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing.
Some persons hold that, while it is proper for the lawgiver to encourage and exhort men to virtue on moral grounds, in the expectation that those who have had a virtuous moral upbringing will respond, yet he is bound to impose chastisement and penalties on the disobedient and ill-conditioned, and to banish the incorrigible out of the state altogether. For (they argue) although the virtuous man, who guides his life by moral ideals, will be obedient to reason, the base, whose desires are fixed on pleasure, must be chastised by pain, like a beast of burden.
The most beautiful colors laid on at random, give less pleasure than a black-and-white drawing.
A vivid image compels the whole body to follow.
It may be argued that peoples for whom philosophers legislate are always prosperous.
The secret to humor is surprise.
That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it
When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use
All Earthquakes and Disasters are warnings; there’s too much corruption in the world
Cruel is the strife of brothers.
There are three things that are the motives of choice and three that are the motives of avoidance; namely, the noble, the expedient, and the pleasant, and their opposites, the base, the harmful, and the painful. Now in respect of all these the good man is likely to go right and the bad to go wrong, but especially in respect of pleasure; for pleasure is common to man with the lower animals, and also it is a concomitant of all the objects of choice, since both the noble and the expedient appear to us pleasant.
It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.
In [the soul] one part naturally rules, and the other is subject, and the virtue of the ruler we maintain to be different from that of the subject; the one being the virtue of the rational, and the other of the irrational part. Now, it is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature.
For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.
People never know each other until they have eaten a certain amount of salt together.
Let us be well persuaded that everyone of us possesses happiness in proportion to his virtue and wisdom, and according as he acts in obedience to their suggestion.
A state of the soul is either (1) an emotion, (2) a capacity, or (3) a disposition; virtue therefore must be one of these three things.
When their adventures do not succeed, however, they run away; but it was the mark of a brave man to face things that are, and seem, terrible for a man, because it is noble to do so and disgraceful not to do so.
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.
We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
The perversions are as follows: of royalty, tyranny; of aristocracy, oligarchy; of constitutional government, democracy.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
We are what we continually do.
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