The honors and rewards fall to those who show their good qualities in action.

Music directly represents the passions of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.

What is the highest of all goods achievable by action? ...both the general run of man and people of superior refinement say that it is happiness ...but with regard to what happiness is they differ.

Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.

There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

A state of the soul is either (1) an emotion, (2) a capacity, or (3) a disposition; virtue therefore must be one of these three things.

Neither should men study war with a view to the enslavement of those who do not deserve to be enslaved; but first of all they should provide against their own enslavement, and in the second place obtain empire for the good of the governed, and not for the sake of exercising a general despotism, and in the third place they should seek to be masters only over those who deserve to be slaves.