Aristotle - Nicomachean Ethics

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One thing alone not even God can do, To make undone whatever hath been done.

Aristotle
Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.

Aristotle
The man with a host of friends who slaps on the back everybody he meets is regarded as the friend of nobody.

Aristotle
Moral qualities are so constituted as to be destroyed by excess and by deficiency...

Aristotle
All men, or most men, wish what is noble but choose what is profitable; and while it is noble to render a service not with an eye to receiving one in return, it is profitable to receive one. One ought therefore, if one can, to return the equivalent of services received, and to do so willingly; for one ought not to make a man one's friend if one is unwilling to return his favors.

Aristotle
The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.

Aristotle
The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit.

Aristotle
Both Self-restraint and Unrestraint are a matter of extremes as compared with the character of the mass of mankind; the restrained man shows more and the unrestrained man less steadfastness than most men are capable of.

Aristotle
The brave man, if he be compared with the coward, seems foolhardy; and, if with the foolhardy man, seems a coward.

Aristotle
It is our actions and the soul's active exercise of its functions that we posit (as being Happiness);

Aristotle
Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue

Aristotle
These two rational faculties may be designated the Scientific Faculty and the Calculative Faculty respectively; since calculation is the same as deliberation, and deliberation is never exercised about things that are invariable, so that the Calculative Faculty is a separate part of the rational half of the soul.

Aristotle
If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake (everything else being desired for the sake of this), and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (for at that rate the process would go on to infinity, so that our desire would be empty and vain), clearly this must be the good and the chief good.

Aristotle
The soul has two parts, one rational and the other irrational. Let us now similarly divide the rational part, and let it be assumed that there are two rational faculties, one whereby we contemplate those things whose first principles are invariable, and one whereby we contemplate those things which admit of variation.

Aristotle
With a true view all the data harmonize, but with a false one the facts soon clash.

Aristotle
A man is his own best friend; therefore he ought to love himself best.

Aristotle
He then alone will strictly be called brave who is fearless of a noble death, and of all such chances as come upon us with sudden death in their train.

Aristotle
The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

Aristotle
In a word, everything that we choose we choose for the sake of something else—except happiness, which is an end.

Aristotle
Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

Aristotle
When quarrels and complaints arise, it is when people who are equal have not got equal shares, or vice-versa.

Aristotle
For legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

Aristotle
He is courageous who endures and fears the right thing, for the right motive, in the right way and at the right times.

Aristotle
The prudent man aspires not to pleasure, but to the absence of pain.

Aristotle
The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

Aristotle
We will more easily accomplish what is proper if, like archers, we have a target in sight.

Aristotle
It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Aristotle
There also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet in a manner participates in rational principle.

Aristotle
When you have thrown a stone, you cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the unjust and profligate might at the outset have avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although when they have become unjust and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.

Aristotle
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.

Aristotle