“What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. (1355b 17)”

“All conscious nature has experiences of pleasure and pain. Man alone can deliberately will the repetition of an experience. And repetition, experienced as such, is at the heart, for good and evil, of his faculty of reasoning, and thus makes possible his language, his art, his morality, and indeed his humanity. Yet it is the enemy of life, for repetition is itself the principle, not of life but of mechanism.”

“By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man–every man–is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose”

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

“The purpose of man's creation is that he do good in the world, not substitutehimself for God and think that he can make and unmake the moral law at his ownconvenience and for his own selfish and narrow ends. This is the difference betweenphysical laws and the moral law—the one is to be used and put to service; the othermust be obeyed and served. For God says”

“Without man and his potential for moral progress, the whole of reality would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final purpose.”