Aristotle Quotes
-
A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.
-
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
-
Any change of government which has to be introduced should be one which men, starting from their existing constitutions, will be both willing and able to adopt, since there is quite as much trouble in the reformation of an old constitution as in the establishment of a new one, just as to unlearn is as hard as to learn.
-
Plato is my friend, but truth is a better friend.
-
There are, then, three states of mind ... two vices − that of excess, and that of defect; and one virtue − the mean; and all these are in a certain sense opposed to one another; for the extremes are not only opposed to the mean, but also to one another; and the mean is opposed to the extremes.
-
Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.
-
Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. The first kind depends on the personal character ofthe speaker; the second on putting the audience into a certain frame of mind; the third on the proof, provided by the words of the speech itself.
-
If something's bound to happen, it will happen.. Right time, right erson, and for the best reason.
-
Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil.
-
Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.
-
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.
-
Marriage is like retiring as a bachelor and getting a sexual pension. You don't have to work for the sex any more, but you only get 65% as much.
-
There is also a doubt as to what is to be the supreme power in the state: - Is it the multitude? Or the wealthy? Or the good? Or the one best man? Or a tyrant?
-
Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones.
-
But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just?
-
Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
-
Female cats are very Lascivious, and make advances to the male.
-
We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses - in short, from fewer premises.
-
The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.
-
...in this way the structure of the universe- I mean, of the heavens and the earth and the whole world- was arranged by one harmony through the blending of the most opposite principles.
-
No one praises happiness as one praises justice, but we call it a 'blessing,' deeming it something higher and more divine than things we praise.
-
It Justice is complete virtue in the fullest sense, because it is the active exercise of complete virtue; and it is complete because its possessor can exercise it in relation to another person, and not only by himself.
-
The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.
-
The man with a host of friends who slaps on the back everybody he meets is regarded as the friend of nobody.