We assume therefore that moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

[Hope is] the dream of a waking man.

The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse.

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too.

Opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief.

Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws.