Aristotle Quotes
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Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.
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The least deviation from truth will be multiplied later.
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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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Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.
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Man by nature wants to know.
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Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
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The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them permanent need of a chief.
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If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.
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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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Change in all things is sweet.
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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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There are no experienced young people. Time makes experience.
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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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That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.
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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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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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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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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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The Eyes are the organs of temptation, and the Ears are the organs of instruction.
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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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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.
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Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?
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There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.
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A king ruleth as he ought, a tyrant as he lists, a king to the profit of all, a tyrant only to please a few.