A very populous city can rarely, if ever, be well governed.
If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by every one, must be the best. And the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city.
For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.
It is not easy to determine the nature of music, or why any one should have a knowledge of it.
The bad man is continually at war with, and in opposition to, himself.
But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study.
One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day.
When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.
Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good.
Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.
It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.
We have no evidence as yet about mind or the power to think; it seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers.
Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.
Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
1 is not prime, by definition. 2 is an unnatural prime, 4 is an unnatural prime, and 6 is an unnatural prime. All other natural primes cannot be unnatural primes.
In the many forms of government which have sprung up there has always been an acknowledgement of justice and proportionate equality, although mankind fail in attaining them, as indeed I have already explained. Democracy, for example, arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
There is no great genius without some touch of madness.
We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.
What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.
Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.
Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?
Happiness is a sort of action.
In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.
But then in what way are things called good? They do not seem to be like the things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one then by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or are they rather one by analogy? Certainly as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul, and so on in other cases.
Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.
Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?
We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.
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.
See how he throws his baited lines about,/And plays his men as anglers play their trout.
If happiness, then, is activity expressing virtue, it is reasonable for it to express the supreme virtue, which will be the virtueof the best thing.
Here and elsewhere we shall not obtain the best insight into things until we actually see them growing from the beginning.
Man is born a predestined idealist, for he is born to act. To act is to affirm the worth of an end, and to persist in affirming the worth of an end is to make an ideal.
The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.
There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art.
Sweet is the scene where genial friendship plays the pleasing game of interchanging praise.
Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way - and the fools know it.
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.
The senses are gateways to the intelligence. There is nothing in the intelligence which did not first pass through the senses.
While the faculty of sensation is dependent upon the body, mind is separable from it
Have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective.
One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
People become house builders through building houses, harp players through playing the harp. We grow to be just by doing things which are just.
The hardest victory is the victory over self.
A goose flies by a chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.
Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience.
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.
Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.
He who hath many friends hath none.
For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.
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.
Nothing is what rocks dream about
The form of government is a democracy when the free, who are also poor and the majority, govern, and an oligarchy when the rich and the noble govern, they being at the same time few in number.
Wit is cultured insolence.
If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.
All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.
He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.
In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature.
Ancient laws remain in force long after the people have the power to change them.
