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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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.
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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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Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
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Xenophanes states that the fire in Lipara once failed for sixteen years, but returned in the seventeenth year. They say that the lava-stream in Etna is neither flaming nor continuous, but returns only after an interval of many years.
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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.
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When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.
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He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.
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When you have thrown a stone, you cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the unjust and profligate might at the outset have avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although when they have become unjust and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.
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Metaphysics involves intuitive knowledge of unprovable starting-points concepts and truth and demonstrative knowledge of what follows from them.
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Happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement.
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Therefore only an utterly senseless person can fail to know that our characters are the result of our conduct.
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The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.
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There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.
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It is possible to fail in many ways . . . while to succeed is possible only in one way, for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult - to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult.
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Even that some people try deceived me many times ... I will not fail to believe that somewhere, someone deserves my trust.
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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?
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Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.
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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.
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Tragedy is an imitation not of men but of a life, an action.
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It is also in the interests of a tyrant to make his subjects poo...the people are so occupied with their daily tasks that they have no time for plotting.
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Everything is done with a goal, and that goal is "good."
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Injustice results as much from treating unequals equally as from treating equals unequally.
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Whether we call it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls.