Aristotle Quotes
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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.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.
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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 best way to avoid envy is to deserve the success you get.
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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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There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.
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He is courageous who endures and fears the right thing, for the right motive, in the right way and at the right times.
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The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction.
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Imagination is a sort of faint perception.
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Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.
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When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.
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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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Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
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Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.
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The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
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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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It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.
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It may be argued that peoples for whom philosophers legislate are always prosperous.