Aristotle Quotes
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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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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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Some things the legislator must find ready to his hand in a state, others he must provide. And therefore we can only say: May our state be constituted in such a manner as to be blessed with the goods of which fortune disposes: whereas virtue and goodness in the state are not a matter of chance but the result of knowledge and purpose. A city can be virtuous only when the citizens who have a share in the government are virtuous, and in our state all the citizens share in the government.
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Happiness is the highest good.
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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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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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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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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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Personal beauty requires that one should be tall; little people may have charm and elegance, but beauty-no.
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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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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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To appreciate the beauty of a snow flake, it is necessary to stand out in the cold.
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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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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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Special care should be taken of the health of the inhabitants, which will depend chiefly on the healthiness of the locality and of the quarter to which they are exposed, and secondly on the use of pure water; this latter point is by no means a secondary consideration. For the elements which we use the most and oftenest for the support of the body contribute most to health, and among those are water and air. Wherefore, in all wise states, if there is want of pure water, and the supply is not all equally good, the drinking water ought to be separated from that which is used for other purposes.
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If what was said in the Ethics is true, that the happy life is the life according to virtue lived without impediment, and that virtue is a mean, then the life which is in a mean, and in a mean attainable by every one, must be the best. And the same principles of virtue and vice are characteristic of cities and of constitutions; for the constitution is in a figure the life of the city.
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The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.
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Irrational passions would seem to be as much a part of human nature as is reason.
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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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There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.
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The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more.
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The greatest victory is over self.
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For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.
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That in the soul which is called mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing. For this reason it cannot reasonably be regarded as blended with the body.