89 definitions
The book's index
Elements of Ethics, Fragments, and Excerpts
70 concepts · 89 definitions
- admonition1
- beauty1
- birth1
- brother1
- care1
- character1
- childlessness1
- children1
- choice1
- circles of concern2
- city1
- cohesion1
- common good1
- complaint1
- custom2
- divine punishment1
- ethics1
- evil1
- fairness1
- family1
- fatherland1
- fear1
- filial piety1
- foolishness1
- forms of address1
- friendship1
- God2
- golden rule1
- gratitude1
- home2
- household1
- housework1
- human nature1
- indifference1
- innovation1
- instinct1
- kindness1
- kinship1
- law1
- life2
- madness1
- man1
- marriage3
- masculinity1
- matter1
- medicine1
- mother1
- nature2
- nyctophobia1
- oikeiosis2
- old age1
- parent1
- parents2
- perception2
- procreation1
- reason3
- revenge1
- self-interest1
- self-knowledge1
- self-love3
- self-perception1
- self-preservation1
- service1
- sleep2
- soul3
- sympathy1
- tension1
- vice1
- wife2
- worry1
Marriage (n.) made for a dowry or a pretty face is a man’s own ruin: through doors hung with garlands he leads in not a wife but a tyrant.
Marriage (n.) is the first and most elementary community: without households there would be no cities, and a bachelor’s household is only half a household.
Marriage (n.) is the wise man’s preference and the single life only a circumstance, so marrying is a duty for us too unless something stands in the way.
Self-love (n.) makes each of us bearable to ourselves even when unbearable to others: we put up with our own reeking, repulsive wounds because they are ours.
Self-love (n.) is nature’s gift to the small and the ugly: she plants a fierce passion for themselves even in unsightly creatures, or they could not survive.
Self-love (n.) inflates our own merits and shrinks everyone else’s, which is why the worse so often rank themselves above the far better.
Reason (n.) adopts strangers: it makes those wholly unrelated by blood our own and supplies us with a wealth of allies.
Reason (n.) was given us in place of everything else so that we might see nature itself, as an archer sees a well-lit, fixed target.
Reason (n.) is the weapon that makes beasts swifter, bigger and stronger than us still turn and run when they sense it.
The Soul (n.) is a body too, as touchable as flesh: it can be pressed, can resist, can strike and be struck back.
The Soul (n.) is nature thinned out: in the womb the breath is dense and far from soul, but worked fine by its own labour toward birth it becomes soul.
The Soul (n.) does not sit in the body like liquid in a jar; it is blended through it as fire runs through red-hot iron.
The Circles of concern (n.) are meant to be pulled inward: the duty is to keep moving people from each outer ring into the one inside it, treating elders as grandparents and peers as cousins.
The Circles of concern (n.) ring each of us: the mind at the centre with its body, then parents, siblings, wife and children, then uncles, grandparents and cousins, then all kin, deme, tribe, city, neighbours, nation — and outermost the whole human race.
Custom (n.) is the unwritten law, and its lawgiver is the satisfaction of everyone who lives by it — which brings it close to justice by nature.
Custom (n.) from yesterday or the day before is not ancestral, and perhaps not custom at all.
Perception (n.) always carries a perception of oneself: seeing white, we feel ourselves whitened; tasting something sweet, sweetened; touching heat, heated.
Perception (n.) was not given to us only to grasp the outside world; before anything else it is an animal grasping itself.
A Wife (n.) is not a burden but a lightener: nothing in the world is too heavy for a husband and wife who think alike and agree to carry it together.
A Wife (n.) disarms the troubles a husband carries home: she asks about them, takes them up, turns them over with him, and lightens them by her plain eagerness.
A God (n.) can no more do harm than heat can chill: doing evil belongs to the opposite of a benefactor.
A God (n.) never changes his mind: steadiness is a virtue, and a god who let off the guilty could neither rule the world justly nor explain his change of heart.
A Home (n.) is a temple, and the children in it are priests, chosen and consecrated by nature to tend their parents.
A Home (n.) is not made beautiful by marble walls, jewelled porticoes or clipped myrtles but by a husband and wife who share each other’s fate.