Quote collection
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"Prudence as well as Moral Virtue determines the complete performance of a man's proper function: Virtue ensures the rightness of the end we aim at, Prudence ensures the rightness of the means we adopt to gain that end."
"While fiction is often impossible, it should not be implausible."
"Great and frequent reverses can crush and mar our bliss both by the pain they cause and by the hindrance they offer to many activities. Yet nevertheless even in adversity nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul."
"The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula."
"Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions."
"A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts."
"The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five."
"We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things."
"The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again."
"Excellence or virtue in a man will be the disposition which renders him a good man and also which will cause him to perform his function well."
"There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each (inanimate) instrument could do its own work."
"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."
"In order to be effective you need not only virtue but also mental strength."
"The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little."
"Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit."
"For imitation is natural to man from his infancy. Man differs from other animals particularly in this, that he is imitative, and acquires his rudiments of knowledge in this way; besides, the delight in it is universal."
"While the faculty of sensation is dependent upon the body, mind is separable from it"
"The final cause, then, produces motion through being loved."
"Man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect."
"This world is inescapably linked to the motions of the worlds above. All power in this world is ruled by these options."