Aristotle

To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

Through discipline comes freedom.

All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

It is not always the same thing to be a good man and a good citizen.

Happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.

Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

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.

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.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

No one loves the man whom he fears.

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