Now that practical skills have developed enough to provide adequately for material needs, one of these sciences which are not devoted to utilitarian ends [mathematics] has been able to arise in Egypt, the priestly caste there having the leisure necessary for disinterested research.

We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends behave to us

In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

The heart is the perfection of the whole organism. Therefore the principles of the power of perception and the souls ability to nourish itself must lie in the heart.