Men are good in but one way, but bad in many.
Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.
When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.
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.
Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because life is sweet and they are growing.
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Happiness does not lie in amusement; it would be strange if one were to take trouble and suffer hardship all one's life in order to amuse oneself.
It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.
Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.
Philosophy can make people sick.
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.
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 pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant.
Again, it is possible to fail in many ways (for evil belongs to the class of the unlimited and good to that of the limited), while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult); for these reasons also, then, excess and defect are characteristic of vice, and the mean of virtue; For men are good in but one way, but bad in many.
Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.
If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.
He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.
Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be.
A young man is not a proper hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life, but its discussions start from these and are about these; and, further, since he tends to follow his passions, his study will be vain and unprofitable, because the end that is aimed at is not knowledge but action. And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character.
Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.
The ideal man is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy.
The mass of mankind are evidently slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts.
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
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