The first principle of all action is leisure.

Wise people have an inward sense of what is beautiful, and the highest wisdom is to trust this intuition and be guided by it.

We must speak first about the division of land and about those who cultivate it: who should they be and what kind of person? We do not agree with those who have said that property should be communally owned, but we do believe that there should be a friendly arrangement for its common use, and that none of the citizens should be without means of support.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

. . . the man is free, we say, who exists for his own sake and not for another's.