Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
True strength lies in gentleness.
One minute of patience can result in ten years of peace.
The most faithful mirror is an old friend.
There are two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.
Live to the point of tears.
Nadie puede trabar amistad con otro si no ha experimentado la benevolencia.
Character in a play is that which reveals the moral purpose of the agents, ie, the sort of thing they seek or avoid, where that is not obvious – hence there is no room for character in a speech on a purely indifferent subject.
Democracy, he explains, is the government not of the many but of the poor; oligarchy a government not of the few but of the rich.
Ordinary people do this either at random or through practice and from acquired habit.
If the pleasure is immediate and the pain distant, or if the profit is immediate and the punishment distant. This is the kind of thing that moves weak-willed people, and there is no human impulse that is not liable to moral weakness.
Trusting people, the kind who are not on their guard and do not take precautions, because it is always easy to get away with wronging them.
For it is about our actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity.
State comes into being for the sake of living, but it exists for the sake of living well.
And retaliation too is pleasant, because if failing at it is painful, succeeding at it is pleasant.
Because poets are by nature like us, those who are dominated by some passion seem most convincing; The outraged roar and angry are angry most truthfully.
For political science does not make men, but takes them from nature and uses them; and nature provides them with food from different elements of earth, air, or sea.
But people are most likely to think that they can do wrong without paying the penalty if they are good speakers or men of affairs or have wide experience of litigation, or if they have many friends, or if they are rich.
Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals being this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation.
Of all plots and actions the epeisodic are the worst. I call a plot ‘epeisodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence. Bad poets compose such pieces by their own fault, good poets, to please the players; for, as they write show pieces for competition, they stretch the plot beyond its capacity, and are often forced to break the natural continuity.
What difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by the women?