Nicomachean Ethics Quotes

“Happiness belongs to the class of things precious and final.”

“Now of the Chief Good (i.e. of Happiness) men seem to form their notions from the different modes of life, as we might naturally expect: the many and most low conceive it to be pleasure, and hence they are content with the life of sensual enjoyment.”

“So then Happiness is manifestly something focal and self-sufficient, being the end of all things which are and may be done.”

“But what kind of things one ought to choose instead of what, it is not easy to settle, for there are many differences in particular instances.”

“I draw no distinction between young in years, and youthful in temper and disposition.”

“For to constitute Happiness, there must be, as we have said, complete virtue and a complete life.”

“Every bad man is ignorant what he ought to do and what to leave undone, and by reason of such error men become unjust and wholly evil.”

“Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”

“The man of education will seek exactness do far in each subject as the nature of the thing admits, it being plainly much the same absurdity to put up with a mathematician who tries to persuade without proving, and to demand strict demonstrative reasoning of a Rhetorician.”

“By Human Excellence we mean not that of man’s body but that of his soul; for we call Happiness a working of the Soul.”

“Are we then to call no man happy while he lives, and, as Solon would have us, look to the end? And again, if we are to maintain this position, is a man then happy when he is dead?”

“Men are not justified by calling those actions involuntary, which are done by reason of Anger or Lust.”

“The points required in Happiness are found in combination of our account of it. For some think it is virtue, others practical wisdom, others a kind of scientific philosophy; others that it is these, or else some one of them, in combination with pleasure, or at least not independently of it; while others again take in external prosperity. ”

“We praise the Reason or Rational part of the Soul, because it exhorts a right and to the best course: but clearly there is in them, beside the Reason, some other natural principle which fights with and strains against the Reason.”

“You must not demand the reason either in all things alike, because in some it is sufficient that the fact has been well demonstrated.”

“The man who is truly good and sensible bears all fortunes, we presume, becomingly, and always does what is noblest under the circumstances.”

“For as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy. ”

“To sift all of the opinions would be perhaps rather a fruitless task; so it shall suffice to sift those which are most generally current, or are thought to have some reason in them.”

“The Chief Good we feel instinctively must be something which is our own, and not easily to be taken from us.”

“It is plain then that the good or ill fortunes of their friends do affect the dead somewhat.”