...for all men do their acts with a view to achieving something which is, in their view, a good.

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.

He who thus considers things in their first growth and origin ... will obtain the clearest view of them.

When you have thrown a stone, you cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the unjust and profligate might at the outset have avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although when they have become unjust and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.

Dissimilarity of habit tends more than anything to destroy affection.

We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.

So we must lay it down that the association which is a state exists not for the purpose of living together but for the sake of noble actions.