I. Frost's Selected Quotations

Everything at Amazon by and about: Aristotle

Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.

The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead.

Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.

Education is the best provision for old age.

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.

The flute is not an instrument that has a good moral effect; it is too exciting.


The gods too are fond of a joke.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities.

The quality of life is determined by its activities.

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.

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

No great genius is without an admixture of madness.


"All men by nature desire to know." Metaphysics, Bk I, Ch 1, 980a, 23.

"We cannot learn without pain." Politics, Bk V, Ch 1, 1301a, 28-30.

"Man is by nature a political animal." Politics, I, Ch 2, 1253a, 1.

"If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost." Politics, Bk IV, Ch 8, 1294a, 4.

"So the good has been well explained as that at which all things aim."


"To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls."

"The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime ; for one swallow does not a summer make." Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a18.

"We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time."

"To the query, "What is a friend?" his reply was "A single soul dwelling in two bodies.""

"If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence."

"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 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."


"For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of editions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches."


"Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions."


"What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens,namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions."


"Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth."


"Wit is educated insolence."