76
Life is a stern business in any case: why pretend that it is anything else?
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77
Hence the necessity that he should have been well trained in habits, who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and moral philosophy generally.
78
Furthermore, Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities, and legislators seem to be more anxious to secure it than Justice even.
79
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Wrongly attributed
This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.
80
My aim is to show that only an inappreciable fraction of our ordered and sustained efforts is given to the business of actual living, as distinguished from the preliminaries to living.
81
A person is idle because his thoughts dwell habitually on the instant pleasures of idleness.
82
When we have been engaged in the preliminaries to living for about fifty-five years, we begin to think about slacking off.
83
The beginning of wise living lies in the control of the brain by the will; so that the brain may act according to the precepts which the brain itself gives.
84
The brain can be disciplined by learning the habit of obedience.
85
The secret of calm cheerfulness is kindliness; no person can be consistently cheerful and calm who does not consistently think kind thoughts.
86
The brain can be trained, as the hand and eye can be trained; it can be made as obedient as a sporting dog, and by similar methods.
87
There is no royal road to the control of the brain.
88
if your ordinary day's work is thus exhausting, then the balance of your life is wrong and must be adjusted
89
The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoilt, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your career.
90
A man's powers ought not to be monopolised by his ordinary day's work.
91
The supply of time is truly a daily miracle, an affair genuinely astonishing when one examines it.
92
In the realm of time there is no aristocracy of wealth, and no aristocracy of intellect.
93
The supply of time, though gloriously regular, is cruelly restricted.
94
If you are not prepared for discouragements and disillusions; if you will not be content with a small result for a big effort, then do not begin.
95
No man is so formed that he can be left entirely to himself, to go his own ways; everyone needs to be guided by a preconceived plan, and to follow certain general rules.
96
Ordinary people are sociable and complaisant just from the very opposite feeling;--to bear others' company is easier for them than to bear their own.
97
The young should early be trained to bear being left alone; for it is a source of happiness and peace of mind.
98
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that a man cannot forget,--but not himself, his own character.
99
the need of society drives the human porcupines together--only to be mutually repelled by the many prickly and disagreeable qualities of their nature
100
There is a direct pleasure in seeing work grow under one's hands day by day, until at last it is finished.