Thus Every Action Must Be

There Are Branches Of Learning And Education Which We Must Study Merely With A View To Leisure Spent In Intellectual Activity, And These Are To Be Valued For Their Own Sake; Whereas Those Kinds Of Knowledge Which Are Useful In Business Are To Be Deemed Necessary, And Exist For The Sake Of Other Things.

One Can Aim At Honor Both As One Ought, And More Than One Ought, And Less Than One Ought. He Whose Craving For Honor Is Excessive Is Said To Be Ambitious, And He Who Is Deficient In This Respect Unambitious; While He Who Observes The Mean Has No Peculiar Name.

If Then, As We Say, Good Craftsmen Look To The Mean As They Work, And If Virtue, Like Nature, Is More Accurate And Better Than Any Form Of Art, It Will Follow That Virtue Has The Quality Of Hitting The Mean. I Refer To Moral Virtue [not Intellectual], For This Is Concerned With Emotions And Actions, In Which One Can Have Excess Or Deficiency Or A Due Mean.

Irrational Passions Would Seem To Be As Much A Part Of Human Nature As Is Reason.

Fortune Favours The Bold.