Quotes about Aristotle

220 Sourced Quotes

People who want to understand democracy should spend less time in the library with Aristotle and more time on the buses and in the subway.

Simeon Strunsky

Nothing seems to me more doubtful than Aristotle's remark that it is probable the arts and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times lost.

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

Conventional dogmas, even if endowed with the authority of an Aristotle - ancient or modern - must be tested vigorously. If they are found wanting, we need not bother with them. But if they are found to be substantially correct, we may not overlook them.

The priests have so disfigured the simple religion of Jesus that no one who reads the sophistications they have engrafted on it, from the jargon of Plato, of Aristotle & other mystics, would conceive these could have been fathered on the sublime preacher of the sermon on the mount.

Thomas Jefferson

This misplacing hath caused a deficience, or at least a great improficience in the sciences themselves. For the handling of final causes, mixed with the rest in physical inquiries, hath intercepted the severe and diligent inquiry of all real and physical causes, and given men the occasion to stay upon these satisfactory and specious causes, to the great arrest and prejudice of further discovery. For this I find done not only by Plato, who ever anchoreth upon that shore, but by Aristotle, Galen, and others which do usually likewise fall upon these flats of discoursing causes.

Horace and Aristotle told us of the virtues of their fathers, and the vices of their own time, and authors down through the centuries have told us the same. If they were right, men would now be bears.

Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above these heights, new peaks will rise.

There is in the British Museum an enormous mind. Consider that Plato is there cheek by jowl with Aristotle; and Shakespeare with Marlowe. This great mind is hoarded beyond the power of any single mind to possess it.

To live alone one must be an animal or a god - says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both - a philosopher.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools, that value them by the authority of an Aristotle, a Cicero, or a Thomas, or any other doctor whatsoever, if but a man.

That Logic has advanced in this sure course, even from the earliest times, is apparent from the fact that, since Aristotle, it has been unable to advance a step, and thus to all appearance has reached its completion.

In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roastbeef and potato.

A better man was Aristotle,
Pulling steady on the bottle.

John Crowe Ransom

Aristotle and Plato are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man will see that Aristotle platonizes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Secondly, the educated citizen has an obligation to serve the public. He may be a precinct worker or President. He may give his talents at the courthouse, the State house, the White House. He may be a civil servant or a Senator, a candidate or a campaign worker, a winner or a loser. But he must be a participant and not a spectator. "At the Olympic games," Aristotle wrote, "it is not the finest and strongest men who are crowned, but they who enter the lists-for out of these the prize-men are elected. So, too, in life, of the honorable and the good, it is they who act who rightly win the prizes."

John F. Kennedy

There exists one book, which, to my taste, furnishes the happiest treatise of natural education. What then is this marvelous book? Is it Aristotle? Is it Pliny, is it Buffon? No—it is Robinson Crusoe.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

After Plotinus, says Schassler, fifteen centuries passed without the slightest scientific interest for the world of beauty and art.... In reality, nothing of the kind happened. The science of aesthetics … neither did nor could vanish, because it never existed. … the Greeks were so little developed that goodness and beauty seemed to coincide. On that obsolete Greek view of life the science of aesthetics was invented by men of the eighteenth century, and especially shaped and mounted in Baumgarten's theory. The Greeks (as anyone may read in Bénard's book on Aristotle and Walter's work on Plato) never had a science of aesthetics.

Criticism, as it was first instituted by Aristotle, was meant as a standard of judging well.

Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives' mouths.

Bertrand Russell

Plato is my friend — Aristotle is my friend — but my greatest friend is truth.

I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

I have rarely read anything which has interested me more, though I have not read as yet more than a quarter of the book proper. From quotations which I had seen, I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted.

Bertrand Russell

[Aristotle] was the most eminent of all the pupils of Plato…. He seceded from Plato while he was still alive; so that they tell a story that [Plato] said, "Aristotle has kicked us off, just as chickens do their mother after they have been hatched."

Socrates founded philosophy, and Aristotle science. There was philosophy before Socrates, and science before Aristotle; and since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress: but all has all been built upon the foundations they laid.

Aristotle… a mere bond-servant to his logic, thereby rendering it contentious and well nigh useless.

Oscar Wilde, Aristotle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, were all homosexuals. Nero, of course, was, in a public way, in with a boy in Rome.

Aristotle argues, possessions enable men to rise to a higher ethical level by giving them the opportunity to be generous: 'liberality consists in the use which is made of property'—an argument which would greatly appeal to Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. Aristotle's preferred regime was one founded on a middle class, with an equitable distribution of assets.

Aristotle's view that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt, is a positive point of departure for philosophy. Indeed, the world will no doubt learn that it does not do to begin with the negative, and the reason for success up to the present is that philosophers have never quite surrendered to the negative and thus have never earnestly done what they have said. They merely flirt with doubt.

Søren Kierkegaard

Plato says, "'T is to no purpose for a sober man to knock at the door of the Muses;" and Aristotle says "that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of folly."

Michel de Montaigne