Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics is considered his most important work on ethics. It consists of 10 books and was likely dedicated to his son Nichomachus. In the work, Aristotle discusses what constitutes a good life and virtue. He argues that virtue lies within our power and that we become virtuous through habit, not just teaching. True happiness also requires both virtue and a complete lifetime.

2. SELECTION FROM
NICHOMACHEAN ETHICS
The Nichomachean Ethics is
the name normally given to
Aristotle’s best known work
on ethics.

3. Aristotle (384BC-322BC) was a
Greek philosopher and scientist born
in the city of Stagira on the northern
periphery of classical Greece.
His father Nichomachean died when
Aristotle was a child, where after
Proxenus became his guardian.

4. At seventeen or eighteen years of age
he joined Plato’s Academy in Athens.
His writings cover many subjects
including physics , biology , zoology
, metaphysics , logic , ethics and
poetry etc.

5. Aristotle also tutored Alexandar the
Great beginning in 343 BC, at the
request of his father Philip.

6. The work which plays a pre-eminent
role in defining Aristotlelian ethics,
consists of ten books.
The title is often assumed to refer to
his son Nichomachus, to whom the
work was dedicated.

7. Quotations From Nichomachean
Ethics
One Swallow does not make a
summer, neither does one fine day.
Similarly one day or brief time of
happiness does not make a person
entirely happy.

8. For the things we have to learn
before we can do them, we learn by
doing them.
Without friends, no one would want
to live even if he had all other goods.

9. Philosophy can make people sick.
 The good of man is a working of the
soul in the way of excellence in a
complete life.
Freedom is obedience of self-
formulated rules.

10. Bad people are in conflict with
themselves, they desire on things and
will another, like the incontinent who
choose harmful pleasures instead of
what they themselves believe to be
good.

11. The self-indulgent man craves for all
pleasant things …and is led by his
appetite to choose these at the cost of
everything else.

12. The pleasure arising from thinking
and learning will make us think and
learn all the more.
Wealth is evidently not the good we
are seeking , for it is merely useful
and for the sake of something else.

13. Virtue lies in our power, and
similarly so does vice; because where
it is in our power to act , it is also in
our power not to act.

14. He is happy who lives in accordance
with complete virtue and is
sufficiently equipped with external
goods, not for some chance period
but throughout a complete life.

15. Men cannot know each other till they
have ‘eaten salt together’.
The beginning seems to be more than
half of the whole.

16. To die to escape from poverty or love
or anything painful is not the mark of
a brave man.
Each man judges correctly those
matters with which he is acquainted;
it is of these that he is a complete
critic.

17. The life of active virtue is essentially
pleasant.
The man who does not enjoy doing
noble actions is not a good man at all.

18. Wisdom , intellegence
prudence,intellectual, liberality and
temperance are moral virtues.

19. The good of man comes to be ‘a
working of the soul in the way of
excellence’.
When people are friends they have
no need of justice , but when they are
just, they do need friendshif in
addition.

20. Habituation , not teaching, is the
route to moral virtue. We must
practice doing good actions, not just
read about virtue.
Happiness requires both complete
goodness and a complete lifetime.

21. To avoid the painful and aim at the
pleasurable is one of the most
obvious tendencies of human nature.
Every type of activity produces the
corresponding sort of the person.