Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously.

Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.

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.

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.

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.

Inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state. And they must make a difference: for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.