Aristotle Quotes
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The rattle is a toy suited to the infant mind, and education is a rattle or toy for children of larger growth.
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Men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
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Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.
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A city is composed of different kinds of men; similar people cannot bring a city into existence.
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Obstinate people can be divided into the opinionated, the ignorant, and the boorish.
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When the citizens at large administer the state for the common interest, the government is called by the generic name - a constitution.
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It is evident, then, that there is a sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble.
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The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.
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The student of politics therefore as well as the psychologist must study the nature of the soul.
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Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws.
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Hence intellect is both a beginning and an end, for the demonstrations arise from these, and concern them. As a result, one ought to pay attention to the undemonstrated assertions and opinions of experienced and older people, or of the prudent, no less than to demonstrations, for, because the have an experienced eye, they see correctly.
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Great is the good fortune of a state in which the citizens have a moderate and sufficient property.
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Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
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Cruel is the strife of brothers.
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A democracy is a government in the hands of men of low birth, no property, and vulgar employments.
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If the poor, for example, because they are more in number, divide among themselves the property of the rich,- is not this unjust? . . this law of confiscation clearly cannot be just.
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Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.
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So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency.
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It is easier to get one or a few of good sense, and of ability to legislate and adjudge, than to get many.
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The ensouled is distinguished from the unsouled by its being alive. Now since being alive is spoken of in many ways, even if only one of these is present, we say that the thing is alive, if, for instance, there is intellect or perception or spatial movement and rest or indeed movement connected with nourishment and growth and decay. It is for this reason that all the plants are also held to be alive . . .
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Not every action or emotion however admits of the observance of a due mean. Indeed the very names of some directly imply evil, for instance malice, shamelessness, envy, and, of actions, adultery, theft, murder. All these and similar actions and feelings are blamed as being bad in themselves; it is not the excess or deficiency of them that we blame. It is impossible therefore ever to go right in regard to them - one must always be wrong.
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We, on the other hand, must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion.
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The angry man wishes the object of his anger to suffer in return; hatred wishes its object not to exist.
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To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.