Aristotle Quotes

548 Sourced Quotes

A state of the soul is either (1) an emotion, (2) a capacity, or (3) a disposition; virtue therefore must be one of these three things.

Aristotle
Rising before daylight is also to be commended; it is a healthy habit, and gives more time for the management of the household as well as for liberal studies.

Aristotle
Knowledge of any kind is a thing to be honored and prized...

Aristotle
If happiness, then, is activity expressing virtue, it is reasonable for it to express the supreme virtue, which will be the virtueof the best thing.

Aristotle
One citizen differs from another, but the salvation of the community is the common business of them all. This community is the constitution; the virtue of the citizen must therefore be relative to the constitution of which he is a member.

Aristotle
Men become richer not only by increasing their existing wealth but also by decreasing their expenditure.

Aristotle
There is no such thing as committing adultery with the right woman, at the right time, and in the right way, for it is simply WRONG.

Aristotle
Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.

Aristotle
All three states - the Lacedaemonian, the Cretan, and the Carthaginian - nearly resemble one another, and are very different from any others. Many of the Carthaginian institutions are excellent. The superiority of their constitution is proved by the fact that the common people remains loyal to the constitution; the Carthaginians have never had any rebellion worth speaking of, and have never been under the rule of a tyrant.

Aristotle
Opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in the brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief.

Aristotle
There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul (1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving. Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.

Aristotle
Young men have strong passions and tend to gratify them indiscriminately. Of the bodily desires, it is the sexual by which they are most swayed and in which they show absence of control...They are changeable and fickle in their desires which are violent while they last, but quickly over: their impulses are keen but not deep rooted.

Aristotle
It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.

Aristotle
It may be argued that peoples for whom philosophers legislate are always prosperous.

Aristotle
Error is multiform (for evil is a form of the unlimited, as in the old Pythagorean imagery, and good of the limited), whereas success is possible in one way only (which is why it is easy to fail and difficult to succeed - easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it); so this is another reason why excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue: Goodness is simple, badness is manifold.

Aristotle
Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were.

Aristotle
It [the tornado] moves things by it wind in the direction in which it is blowing in a straight line, and whirls round by its circular motion and forcibly snatches up whatever it meets.

Aristotle
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.

Aristotle
Most persons think that a state in order to be happy ought to be large; but even if they are right, they have no idea of what is a large and what a small state.... To the size of states there is a limit, as there is to other things, plants, animals, implements; for none of these retain their natural power when they are too large or too small, but they either wholly lose their nature, or are spoiled.

Aristotle
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.

Aristotle
It would then be most admirably adapted to the purposes of justice, if laws properly enacted were, as far as circumstances admitted, of themselves to mark out all cases, and to abandon as few as possible to the discretion of the judge.

Aristotle
And, speaking generally, passion seems not to be amenable to reason, but only to force.

Aristotle
But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Aristotle
No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature.

Aristotle
In framing an ideal we may assume what we wish, but should avoid impossibilities.

Aristotle
In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all.

Aristotle
Comedy has had no history, because it was not at first treated seriously.

Aristotle
The man who confers a favour would rather not be repaid in the same coin.

Aristotle
The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

Aristotle
He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly worthless.

Aristotle