The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

No science ever defends its first principles.

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.

We assume therefore that moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.