For imagining lies within our power whenever we wish . . . but in forming opinons we are not free . . .

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

To Thales the primary question was not what do we know, but how do we know it.

The worst thing about slavery is that the slaves eventually get to like it.

Anger is always concerned with individuals, ... whereas hatred is directed also against classes: we all hate any thief and any informer. Moreover, anger can be cured by time; but hatred cannot. The one aims at giving pain to its object, the other at doing him harm; the angry man wants his victim to feel; the hater does not mind whether they feel or not.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.