It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite.

Also our fellow competitors, who are indeed the people just mentioned - we do not compete with men who lived a hundred centuries ago, or those yet not born, or the dead, or those who dwell near the Pillars of Hercules, or those whom, in our opinion or that of others, we take to be far below us or far above us. So too we compete with those who follow the same ends as ourselves; we compete with our rivals in sport or in love, and generally with those who are after the same things; and it is therefore these whom we are bound to envy beyond all others. Hence the saying.

When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.

The secret to humor is surprise.

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be.

Happiness is the settling of the soul into its most appropriate spot.