12 December 2020 Aristotle Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy.
3 December 2020 Aristotle To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
3 December 2020 Aristotle In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.
3 December 2020 Aristotle The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
3 December 2020 Aristotle The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
3 December 2020 Aristotle For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.
3 December 2020 Aristotle If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.
3 December 2020 Aristotle But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.
3 December 2020 Aristotle 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.
3 December 2020 Aristotle Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
