My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

A friend to all is a friend to none.

Friendship is essentially a partnership.

He who hath many friends hath none.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

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.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

Well begun is half done.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

Quality is not an act, it is a habit.

Democracy 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.

If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.

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.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

Education is the best provision for old age.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.

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.

There is no great genius without some touch of madness.

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

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

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Wit is educated insolence.

It is just that we should be grateful, not only to those with whose views we may agree, but also to those who have expressed more superficial views; for these also contributed something, by developing before us the powers of thought.

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

To attain any assured knowledge about the soul is one of the most difficult things in the world.

Anybody can become angry - that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.

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.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.