Where perception is, there also are pain and pleasure, and where these are, there, of necessity, is desire.
Everybody loves a thing more if it has cost him trouble: for instance those who have made money love money more than those who have inherited it.
Greatness of spirit is to bear finely both good fourtune and bad, honor and disgrace, and not to think highly of luxury or attention or power or victories in contests, and to possess a certain depth and magnitude of spirit.
Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.
Our youth should also be educated with music and physical education.
If men are given food, but no chastisement nor any work, they become insolent.
Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages.
Time is the measurable unit of movement concerning a before and an after.
It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge?
A person’s life persuades better than his word.
It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.
Temperance and bravery, then, are ruined by excess and deficiency, but preserved by the mean.
That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.
A gentleman is not disturbed by anything.
Since music has so much to do with the molding of character, it is necessary that we teach it to our children.
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.
All that one gains by falsehood is, not to be believed when he speaks the truth.
For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.
It is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.
The body is at its best between the ages of thirty and thirty-five.