The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing.

Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good.

All food must be capable of being digested, and that what produces digestion is warmth; that is why everything that has soul in it possesses warmth.

Salt water when it turns into vapour becomes sweet, and the vapour does not form salt water when it condenses again. This I know by experiment. The same thing is true in every case of the kind: wine and all fluids that evaporate and condense back into a liquid state become water. They all are water modified by a certain admixture, the nature of which determines their flavour.

Evidence from torture may be considered completely untrustworthy

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

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.