Aristotle Quotes
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Virtue also depends on ourselves. And so also does vice. For where we are free to act we are also free to refrain from acting, and where we are able to say No we are also able to say Yes; if therefore we are responsible for doing a thing when to do it right, we are also responsible for not doing it when not to do it is wrong, and if we are responsible for rightly not doing a thing, we are also responsible for wrongly doing it.
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Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.
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Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty-no.
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He then alone will strictly be called brave who is fearless of a noble death, and of all such chances as come upon us with sudden death in their train.
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Youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate. When the five years have passed away, during the two following years they must look on at the pursuits which they are hereafter to learn. There are two periods of life with reference to which education has to be divided, from seven to the age of puberty, and onwards to the age of one and twenty.
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When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.
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It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator.
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Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.
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The greatest victory is over self.
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Victory is plesant, not only to those who love to conquer, bot to all; for there is produced an idea of superiority, which all with more or less eagerness desire.
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Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.
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But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study.
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We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.
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The happy man . . . will be always or at least most often employed in doing and contemplating the things that are in conformity with virtue. And he will bear changes of fortunes most nobly, and with perfect propriety in every way.
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Property should be in a certain sense common, but, as a general rule, private; for, when every one has a distinct interest, men will not complain of one another, and they will make more progress, because every one will be attending to his own business.
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To appreciate the beauty of a snow flake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.
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In general, what is written must be easy to read and easy to speak; which is the same.
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Man's best friend is one who wishes well to the object of his wish for his sake, even if no one is to know of it.
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It is the repeated performance of just and temperate actions that produces virtue.
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Property should be in a general sense common, but as a general rule private... In well-ordered states, although every man has his own property, some things he will place at the disposal of his friends, while of others he shares the use of them.
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The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more.
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Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.
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If, then, there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else, clearly this must be the good and the chief good.
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For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.