Aristotle Quotes
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The best things are placed between extremes.
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The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.
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Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.
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Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.
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That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.
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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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Philosophy is the science which considers truth.
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Whether we call it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls.
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Man by nature wants to know.
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The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.
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Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
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Change in all things is sweet.
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There are no experienced young people. Time makes experience.
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There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.
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If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
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One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.
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Democracy is the form of government in which the free are rulers, and oligarchy in which the rich; it is only an accident that the free are the many and the rich are the few.
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Finally, if nothing can be truly asserted, even the following claim would be false, the claim that there is no true assertion.
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The Eyes are the organs of temptation, and the Ears are the organs of instruction.
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Moral virtue is ... a mean between two vices, that of excess and that of defect, and ... it is no small task to hit the mean in each case, as it is not, for example, any chance comer, but only the geometer, who can find the center of a given circle.
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Of actions some aim at what is necessary and useful, and some at what is honorable. And the preference given to one or the other class of actions must necessarily be like the preference given to one or other part of the soul and its actions over the other; there must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of things honorable.
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The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
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Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
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Prudence is the virtue of that part of the intellect the calculative to which it belongs; and . . . our choice of actions will not be right without Prudence any more than without Moral Virtue, since, while Moral Virtue enables us to achieve the end, Prudence makes us adopt the right means to the end.