Aristotle Quotes
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And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.
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The bodies of which the world is composed are solids, and therefore have three dimensions. Now, three is the most perfect number,-it is the first of numbers, for of one we do not speak as a number, of two we say both, but three is the first number of which we say all. Moreover, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
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If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.
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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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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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The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction.
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Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
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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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The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.
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Change in all things is sweet.
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Happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.
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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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My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.
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There are no experienced young people. Time makes experience.
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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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Imagination is a sort of faint perception.
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The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.
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There is nothing strange in the circle being the origin of any and every marvel.
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Hence both women and children must be educated with an eye to the constitution, if indeed it makes any difference to the virtue of a city-state that its children be virtuous, and its women too. And it must make a difference, since half the free population are women, and from children come those who participate in the constitution.
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The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.
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It is true, indeed, that the account Plato gives in 'Timaeus' is different from what he says in his so-called 'unwritten teachings.'
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That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill.
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Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
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Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.