Macedonian author Quotes

“I seek to bring forth what you almost already know.”

“Our judgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile.”

“Find the good. Seek the Unity. Ignore the divisions among us.”

“There is an error common to both oligarchies and to democracies: in the latter the demagogues, when the multitude are above the law, are always cutting the city in two by quarrels with the rich, whereas they should always profess to be maintaining their cause; just as in oligarchies the oligarchs should profess to maintain the cause of the people, . .”

“What is the highest good in all matters of action? To the name, there is almost complete agreement; for uneducated and educated alike call it happiness, and make happiness identical with the good life and successful living. They disagree, however, about the meaning of happiness.”

“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.”

“Even if we could suppose the citizen body to be virtuous, without each of them being so, yet the latter would be better, for in the virtue of each the virtue of all is involved.”

“It is likely that unlikely things should happen”

“Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided.”

“We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.”

“Error is multiform (for evil is a form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of the limited), whereas success is possible in one way only (which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed - easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it); so this is another reason why excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue: Goodness is simple, badness is manifold.”

“It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth.”

“Every great genius has an admixture of madness.”

“That which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected. The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution.”

“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.”

“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”

“The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties. This exercise must occupy a complete lifetime. One swallow does make a spring, nor does one fine day. Excellence is a habit, not an event.”

“The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again.”

“Courage is the mother of all virtues because without it, you cannot consistently perform the others.”

“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.”

“If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development”

“To die in order to avoid the pains of poverty, love, or anything that is disagreeable, is not the part of a brave man, but of a coward.”

“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.”

“It is easier to get one or a few of good sense, and of ability to legislate and adjudge, than to get many.”

“To give a satisfactory decision as to the truth it is necessary to be rather an arbitrator than a party to the dispute.”