It is easy to perform a good action, but not easy to acquire a settled habit of performing such actions.

It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

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

I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.

For what is the best choice, for each individual is the highest it is possible for him to achieve.

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

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.

Every rascal is not a thief, but every thief is a rascal

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

Each man judges well the things he knows.

Criticism is something we can avoid easily by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.

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

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

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.

All human beings, by nature, desire to know.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistrates in a state.

"Man's "progress" is but a gradual discovery that his questions have no meaning"

"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

"A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral."