Quotes from The Nicomachean Ethics

Quotations follow the Roger Crisp translation (Cambridge University Press, 2014) — our recommended edition.

1. 2

   It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

2. 3

   One swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

3. 4

   Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, 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.

4. 5

   Anyone can become angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right motive, and in the right way, that is not for everyone, nor is it easy.

5. 6

   Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

6. 7

   For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

7. 8

   For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

8. 9

   But the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

9. 10

   We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

10. 11

    Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit).

11. 12

    Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

12. 13

    Human good turns out to be activity of soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

13. 14

    A friend, being another self, furnishes what a man cannot provide by his own effort.

14. 15

    For we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use.

15. 16

    Now by self-sufficient we do not mean that which is sufficient for a man by himself, for one who lives a solitary life, but also for parents, children, wife, and in general for his friends and fellow citizens, since man is born for citizenship.