Aristotle Quotes
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Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.
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All men naturally desire knowledge. An indication of this is our esteem for the senses; for apart from their use we esteem them for their own sake, and most of all the sense of sight. Not only with a view to action, but even when no action is contemplated, we prefer sight, generally speaking, to all the other senses. The reason of this is that of all the senses sight best helps us to know things, and reveals many distinctions.
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People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.
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It is impossible, or not easy, to alter by argument what has long been absorbed by habit.
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All are agreed that the various moral qualities are in a sense bestowed by nature: we are just, and capable of temperance, and brave, and possessed of the other virtues from the moment of our birth. But nevertheless we expect to find that true goodness is something different, and that the virtues in the true sense come to belong to us in another way. For even children and wild animals possess the natural dispositions, yet without Intelligence these may manifestly be harmful.
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Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.
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Prayers and sacrifices are of no avail.
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Nature operates in the shortest way possible.
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Of mankind in general, the parts are greater than the whole.
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The aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought....The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful.
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There is only one condition in which we can imagine managers not needing subordinates, and masters not needing slaves. This condition would be that each inanimate instrument could do its own work.
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He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.
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Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.
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The best things are placed between extremes.
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If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.
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We make war that we may live in peace.
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Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
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For any two portions of fire, small or great, will exhibit the same ratio of solid to void; but the upward movement of the greater is quicker than that of the less, just as the downward movement of a mass of gold or lead, or of any other body endowed with weight, is quicker in proportion to its size.
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Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
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There are still two forms besides democracy and oligarchy; one of them is universally recognized and included among the four principal forms of government, which are said to be (1) monarchy, (2) oligarchy, (3) democracy, and (4) the so-called aristocracy or government of the best. But there is also a fifth, which retains the generic name of polity or constitutional government.