Ethics and Morality

By desiring little, a poor man makes himself rich.

Do not trust all men, but trust men of worth; the former course is silly, the latter a mark of prudence.

Our sins are more easily remembered than our good deeds.

It is greed to do all the talking but not to want to listen at all.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Bad men are full of repentance.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.

All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

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

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

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.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

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.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.