301
Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance.
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Attribution
302
Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators.
303
Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices.
304
Reckless audacity came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally; prudent hesitation, specious cowardice; moderation was held to be a cloak for unmanliness; ability to see all sides of a question, inaptness to act on any.
305
Intimate friends are not fair witnesses to character, any more than professed enemies.
306
There are those who have gone, for want of this self-knowledge, strangely out of their way, and others who have never found it.
307
Only it seems to me a grievous error in a ruler to quarrel with all his subjects at once.
308
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.
309
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.
310
God helps them that help themselves, as Poor Richard says.
Attribution contested
Quoted constantly as scripture. It is nowhere in the Bible, which says something close to the opposite in several places. Franklin printed it in Poor Richard's Almanack and gathered it here in 1758, but he did not coin it either: he presents it as an existing proverb, and versions of it appear in Algernon Sidney's Discourses in 1698 and, earlier still, in Aesop.
311
Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began,
Attribution contested
The letter opens by naming Paul and the catalogue records that, because it is the only claim the text itself makes. Authorship is disputed: on vocabulary, style and the situation it addresses, many scholars hold it was written in Paul's name by someone in his circle after his death. That was an ordinary practice at the time and is not the same thing as forgery — but it does mean the name on the letter is not settled.
312
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.
Attribution contested
The letter opens by naming Paul and the catalogue records that, because it is the only claim the text itself makes. Authorship is disputed: on vocabulary, style and the situation it addresses, many scholars hold it was written in Paul's name by someone in his circle after his death. That was an ordinary practice at the time and is not the same thing as forgery — but it does mean the name on the letter is not settled.
313
Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.
Wrongly attributed
Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.