Aristotle Quotes

548 Sourced Quotes

All use metaphors in conversation, as well as proper and appropriate words.

Aristotle
The basis of a democratic state is liberty.

Aristotle
To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.

Aristotle
And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.

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
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

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
Anyone can become angry…That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way—that is not easy.

Aristotle
With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.

Aristotle
It is well said, then, that it is by doing just acts that the just man is produced, and by doing temperate acts the temperate man; without doing these no one would have even a prospect of becoming good. But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do.

Aristotle
The virtue of the good man is necessarily the same as the virtue of the citizen of the perfect state.

Aristotle
The prudent man aspires not to pleasure, but to the absence of pain.

Aristotle
Even if you must have regard to wealth, in order to secure leisure, yet it is surely a bad thing that the greatest offices, such as those of kings and generals, should be bought. The law which allows this abuse makes wealth of more account than virtue, and the whole state becomes avaricious.

Aristotle
Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.

Aristotle
No one chooses what does not rest with himself, but only what he thinks can be attained by his own act.

Aristotle
Some vices miss what is right because they are deficient, others because they are excessive, in feelings or in actions, while virtue finds and chooses the mean.

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
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
What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

Aristotle
Our account does not rob the mathematicians of their science... In point of fact they do not need the infinite and do not use it.

Aristotle
Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.

Aristotle
The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.

Aristotle
Of actions some aim at what is necessary and useful, and some at what is honorable. And the preference given to one or the other class of actions must necessarily be like the preference given to one or other part of the soul and its actions over the other; there must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of things honorable.

Aristotle
Let us then enunciate the functions of a state and we shall easily elicit what we want: First there must be food; secondly, arts, for life requires many instruments; thirdly, there must be arms, for the members of a community have need of them, and in their own hands, too, in order to maintain authority both against disobedient subjects and against external assailants....

Aristotle
Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

Aristotle