Quotes about Aristotle

220 Sourced Quotes

Historiography cannot, by itself, answer the question about the criterion for pedagogical authenticity. So much is obvious in the construction of the historical account, which must assume some principle of selection in order to produce a coherent narrative. That principle of selection will be a judgment either of correctness or of "importance." The former begs the question; the latter is either a concealed judgment of correctness or the reduction of philosophy to popularity. In Aristotle, the principle of selection is an otherwise established judgment of correctness. In much academic historiography, the principle often seems to be popularity. Neither provides an answer to the question about legitimate authority in philosophy.

Aristotle explicitly assures us that man, insofar as he is a natural being and belongs to the species of mankind, possesses immortality; through the recurrent cycle of life, nature assures the same kind of being-forever to things that are born and die as to things that are and do not change.

Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the "one." Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the "many."

Robert M. Pirsig

Bacon first taught the world the true method of the study of nature, and rescued science from that barbarism in which the followers of Aristotle, by a too servile imitation of their master.

As Aristotle wrote a long, long time ago, and I'm paraphrasing here, the goal is to avoid mediocrity by being prepared to try something and either failing miserably or triumphing grandly. Mediocrity is not about failing, and it's the opposite of doing. Mediocrity, in other words, is about not trying. The reason is achingly simple, and I know you've heard it a thousand times before: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Georges St-Pierre

Aristotle dines when it seems good to King Philip, but Diogenes when he himself pleases.

Diogenes of Sinope

We cannot exert our understanding without from time to time understanding something of importance; and this act of understanding may be accompanied by the awareness of our understanding, by the understanding of understanding, by noesis noesos, and this is so high, so pure, so noble an experience that Aristotle could ascribe it to his God.

From Aristophanes to Aristotle, the attack on the demagogues always falls back on the one central question: in whose interest does the the leader lead?

Moses I. Finley

Plato and Aristotle were both convinced that democratic government could not function successfully in an area larger than a city-state.

Most impediments to scientific understanding are conceptual locks, not factual lacks. Most difficult to dislodge are those biases that escape our scrutiny because they seem so obviously, even ineluctably, just. We know ourselves best and tend to view other creatures as mirrors of our own constitution and social arrangements. (Aristotle, and nearly two millennia of successors, designated the large bee that leads the swarm as a king.)

Stephen Jay Gould

Aristotle writes that persuasion is based on three things: the ethos, or personal character of the speaker; the pathos, or getting the audience into the right kind of emotional receptivity; and the logos, or the argument itself, carried out by abbreviated syllogisms, or something like deductive syllogisms, and by the use of example.

Aristotle once said that the unexamined life is not worth living. I think it's time to examine what we do once more in the spirit of a critical friend. Let's pause for a moment to consider what we need to examine.

Tell me, ladies and gentlemen, are we the ones to tell them what their instructors have tried to teach them for years? That the philosophers were right.
That Saint Francis, Buddha, Muhammad, Maimonides — all spoke the truth when they said the only way to serve yourself is to serve others; and that Aristotle was right, before them, when he said the only way to assure yourself happiness is to learn to give happiness.

Aristotle's pupil already realized that we have no power at all over our passions as long as we do not know their true causes. Many men have refuted fear, and with sound arguments. But a man who is afraid does not listen to arguments; he listens to the beating of his heart and the pulsating of his blood.

Émile Chartier

Power from natural agents may go by a short line, and then in its activity greater... But if by a straight line then its action is stronger and better, as Aristotle says in Book V of the Physics, because nature operates in the shortest way possible. But the straight line is the shortest of all, as he says in the same place.

Robert Grosseteste

Roark, … like Socrates before him, appears quite willing to martyr himself. … The leading characters in Atlas Shrugged, however, have chosen voluntary exile—reminiscent of Aristotle's response to Athens when he was charged with the same crimes as Socrates.

Douglas Den Uyl

Aristotle laid the foundation of the distinction between use-value and exchange-value, which has remained a part of economic thought to the present day.

Eric Roll, Baron Roll of Ipsden

The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.

Robert [Grosseteste] became much interested in science and scientific method … He was conscious of the dual approach by means of induction and deduction (resolution and composition); i. e., from the empirical knowledge one proceeds to probable general principles, and from these as premises one them derives conclusions which constitute verifications or falsifications of the principles. This approach to science was not that far removed from Aristotle...

As Aristotle also points out, the slenderest acquaintance we can form with heavenly things is more desirable than a thorough grasp of mundane matters.

Aristotle whilst he labours to refute the ideas of Plato, falls upon one himself: for his summum bonum, is a Chimera, and there is no such thing as his Felicity.

For many, as Cranton tells us, and those very wise men, not now but long ago, have deplored the condition of human nature, esteeming life a punishment, and to be born a man the highest pitch of calamity; this, Aristotle tells us, Silenus declared when he was brought captive to Midas.

On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated: "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead."

Diogenes Laërtius

Second Theory.—Whilst one part of the Universe owes its existence to Providence and is under control of a ruler and governor, another part is abandoned and left to chance. This is the view of Aristotle about Providence... He holds that God controls the spheres and what they contain; therefore the individual beings in the spheres remain permanently in the same form.... From the existence of the spheres other beings derive existence, which are constant in their species but not in their individuals.

The word "regime" is not used in the journalistic sense of the "Carter regime," or the "Reagan regime," and so on. Rather it is simply intended as the best English equivalent of what Aristotle meant by a "polity." More specifically by the American "regime," I mean the fundamental political order established by the Constitution of 1789.

Socrates became a trendsetter. Other philosophers, including Plato and Aristotle and Gus, quickly followed suit, dropping their last names too. And, for centuries after that there would be countless imitators including oltaire, Michelangelo, and, much later, Cher.

But, indeed, the science of logic and the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism.

Cicero called Aristotle a river of flowing gold, and said of Plato's Dialogues, that if Jupiter were to speak, it would be in language like theirs.

When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt, I hope and get discouraged, I love and I hate, I feel bad about feeling good, I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.

Brennan Manning

What happened was, 2,400 years ago, the Greek Gang of Three, by whom I mean Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, started to think based on analysis, judgment and knowledge. At the same time, church people, who ran the schools and universities, wanted logic to prove the heretics wrong. As a result, design and perceptual thinking was never developed. People assumed philosophers were doing it and so they blocked anyone else from doing it. But philosophers were not. Philosophers may look out at the world from a stained-glass window, but after a while they stop looking at the world and start looking at the stained glass.