Aristotle Quotes About Choices

• Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

  Aristotle

  Motivational, Wise, Intelligent

• For what is the best choice for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.

  Aristotle

  Inspirational, Sports, Choices

• It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

  Aristotle

  Character, Evil, Choices

  Aristotle (1996). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.58, Wordsworth Editions

• [Prudence] is the virtue of that part of the intellect [the calculative] to which it belongs; and . . . our choice of actions will not be right without Prudence any more than without Moral Virtue, since, while Moral Virtue enables us to achieve the end, Prudence makes us adopt the right means to the end.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Choices, Moral

• Health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance

  Aristotle

  Choices, Matter, Chance

• Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

  Aristotle

  Art, Choices, Inquiry

  Nicomachean Ethics, bk.1, ch.1,1093 (translated by Sir David Ross).

• 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.

  Aristotle

  Animal, Men, Opposites

• Take the case of just actions; just punishments and chastisements do indeed spring from a good principle, but they are good only because we cannot do without them - it would be better that neither individuals nor states should need anything of the sort - but actions which aim at honor and advantage are absolutely the best. The conditional action is only the choice of a lesser evil; whereas these are the foundation and creation of good. A good man may make the best even of poverty and disease, and the other ills of life.

  Aristotle

  Good Life, Spring, Men

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.2113, Princeton University Press

• Rightness in our choice of an end is secured by [Moral] Virtue.

  Aristotle

  Choices, Moral, Virtue

• 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.

  Aristotle

  Lying, Mean, Men

  Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.1748, Princeton University Press

• Choice not chance determines your destiny [my family motto...credited to Aristotle]

  Aristotle

  Destiny, Choices, Chance

• Character is determined by choice, not opinion.

  Aristotle

  Character, Choices, Determined

• The line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.

  Aristotle

  Choices, Abortion, Alive

  Aristotle (1944). “Politics”, Loeb Classical Library

• Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.

  Aristotle

  Mean, Two, Choices

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