Aristotle Quotes
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When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.
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The best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.
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The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction.
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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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Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.
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Great and frequent reverses can crush and mar our bliss both by the pain they cause and by the hindrance they offer to many activities. Yet nevertheless even in adversity nobility shines through, when a man endures repeated and severe misfortune with patience, not owing to insensibility but from generosity and greatness of soul.
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If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.
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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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My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside.
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Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
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It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.
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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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No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
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Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.
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Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
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There is an error common to both oligarchies and to democracies: in the latter the demagogues, when the multitude are above the law, are always cutting the city in two by quarrels with the rich, whereas they should always profess to be maintaining their cause; just as in oligarchies the oligarchs should profess to maintain the cause of the people. . .
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The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
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It would then be most admirably adapted to the purposes of justice, if laws properly enacted were, as far as circumstances admitted, of themselves to mark out all cases, and to abandon as few as possible to the discretion of the judge.
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A right election can only be made by those who have knowledge.
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Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of control...They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted.
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Imagination is a sort of faint perception.
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If some animals are good at hunting and others are suitable for hunting, then the Gods must clearly smile on hunting.
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There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.
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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.'