What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.
We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
The end of labor is to gain leisure.
We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.
The goal of war is peace, of business, leisure.
There is a cropping-time in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men; and then comes a period of barrenness.
The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.
The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.
It is better to rise from life as from a banquetâneither thirsty nor drunken.
It is better to rise from life as from a banquet--neither thirsty nor drunken.
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.
This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.
No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature.
A good style must have an air of novelty, at the same time concealing its art.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Numbers are intellectual witnesses that belong only to mankind.
Wicked men obey from fear; good men, from love.
Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.
A Delphic sword.
Therefore Agathon rightly says: "Of this alone even God is deprived, the power of making things that are past never to have been."
Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.
Man is by nature a civic animal.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.