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.

If happiness, then, is activity expressing virtue, it is reasonable for it to express the supreme virtue, which will be the virtueof the best thing.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

If men think that a ruler is religious and has a reverence for the Gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands.

A thing chosen always as an end and never as a means we call absolutely final. Now happiness above all else appears to be absolutely final in this sense, since we always choose it for its own sake and never as a means to something else.

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.

A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return.