The Nicomachean Ethics

The Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle

Asking for scientific proofs from a political orator surely makes about as much sense as accepting a mathematical proof because it ‘sounds pretty plausible — 2025-09-27

We’re making claims about things that hold for the most part, and on the basis of for-the-most-part facts, so we’ll have to be content with conclusions of the same sort. — 2025-09-27

That’s why lectures on moral and political questions aren’t suitable for the young. Young people have no experience of the actions of life. And that’s what the arguments will be based on. That’s what they’ll be about. Plus, young people tend to act purely on their emotions. So for them, taking the course will be a waste of time. — 2025-09-27

Because our goal here isn’t just about knowing. It’s about doing. And it makes no difference whether you’re actually young in age, or just immature in character. What’s lacking isn’t just a matter of time. It’s about whether you live your life, and pursue the things you pursue, by your emotions. For people like that, knowing doesn’t help, just as it doesn’t help people with no self-control. — 2025-09-27

But as for what ‘flourishing’ {or ‘being blessed’} actually is – people disagree about that, and most people don’t offer the same view of it as philosophers. Most people say it should be some plain, obvious thing like [a life of] pleasure, or wealth, or prestige. Different people have different ideas about it. Or often even the same person. (When you were sick, it was healthy people who were ‘blessed’; now that you’re poor, it’s the rich.) — 2025-09-27

Best of them all is a man who relies on his own understanding. Next best, someone who knows how to take good advice when he hears it. So, if you’re clueless yourself, and unwilling to listen to others, taking to heart what they say – then, sorry, you’re pretty much hopeless. — 2025-09-27

When it comes to the key good, and what it is to flourish, people seem to base their ideas – understandably enough – on their own lives. So ordinary people, the most vulgar and uncouth, think the key good is pleasure. That’s why they’re satisfied with a life of indulging themselves. — 2025-09-27

And no, being ‘everlasting’ does not make it somehow more of a good thing. If A is white for a really long time, and B just for one day, does that make A whiter than B?

— 2025-09-27

the [key] good for human beings turns out to be: activity of the soul that expresses our goodness {or our virtues}.

— 2025-09-28

So that’s exactly the approach you need in other areas as well: never let the side issues become more important than the main tasks.

— 2025-09-28

As they say, ‘the start is more than half the job’ – that’s to say, a lot of the things you’re trying to figure out immediately become clear once you have the right starting point. — 2025-09-28

You have to be in the contest to win. And it’s the same in life: you have to actually do things, and do them right, to win life’s greatest blessings. — 2025-09-28

Now, that part of the soul can be good [at what it does]. But that’s clearly something all living things are good at. That’s obviously not human goodness.81 In fact that part of the soul, that capacity, seems to operate most of all when we’re asleep, whereas good and evil people are pretty much indistinguishable when they’re asleep. (That’s why they say that ‘for half their lives there’s no difference at all between the wretched and the blessed’. — 2025-09-28

It makes sense that it works that way. Sleep is the inactivity of precisely those aspects of the soul by which it’s termed a good or bad soul. (Unless, to some small extent, certain [mental] processes get through to us while we’re asleep, so that the dreams of decent people are better82 than the average person’s.)

— 2025-09-28

It’s like when parts of the body are paralysed, and people mean to move them to the right but they pull the opposite way, to the left. That’s how it can be with the soul. When people lack self-control their impulses pull them in opposite directions. — 2025-09-28

After all, we do bad things because they give us pleasure, and [typically] fail to do honourable things because they’re painful. That’s why it’s important for us to have been brought up a certain way right from childhood – as Plato says17 – so that we enjoy the things we should and feel pain at the things we should. That’s what a good upbringing is. — 2025-10-04

There’s only one way for the good to be good, But so many ways to be bad! — 2025-10-04