Quotes about Aristotle

220 Sourced Quotes

Aristotle was once asked what those who tell lies gain by it. Said he, "That when they speak truth they are not believed."

Diogenes Laërtius

Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled.

Michel Foucault

Aristotle found support for his thesis in facts drawn from geopolitics or 'natural law'. Greek superiority had to be proved demonstrably innate, a gift of nature. In one celebrated fragment he counsels Alexander to be 'a hegemon [leader] of Greeks and a despot to the barbarians, to look after the former as after friends and relatives, and to deal with the latter as with beasts or plants'.

Soil is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen, fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes and other microscopic animals and their parts. 'Nature,' Aristotle observed, 'proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation.' Independence is a political, not a scientific, term.

For him was lever han at his beddes hed
A twenty bokes, clothed in black or red,
Of Aristotle, and his philosophie,
Than robes riche, or fidel, or sautrie.
But all be that he was a philosophre,
Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.

Geoffrey Chaucer

A human's love. I couldn't wish anything better for him. Animals protect what they know. They protect what they are bound to, but humans…humans have a greater capacity for sacrifice for those who live in their hearts. (Aristotle)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

For hym was levere have at his beddes heed Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed, Of Aristotle and his philosophie, Than robes riche, or fithele, or gay sautrie, But al be that he was a philosophre, Yet hadde he but litel gold in cofre.

Geoffrey Chaucer

If we look at the parpens piled up on the building site or at the block of bronze, nothing about them manifests that they are suited to being a house or a statue.... Aristotle speaks of the materials considered as such in terms of "the buildable" (I, 201a 16, b Bf), coining an adjective whose suffix expresses capacity (what he calls dunamis). This capacity, as we have seen, cannot be grasped after the manner of that with which perception provides us (color, hardness, etc.); it requires a gaze capable of probing more deeply, of proceeding from the real to the possible—as when Michelangelo "sees" a David in the formless block abandoned by other sculptors.

Where Plato and Aristotle had asked the question, What is man?, St. Augustine (in the Confessions) asks, Who am I? — and this shift is decisive.

William Barrett

On Teddy Kennedy attending the funeral of her father, Aristotle Onassis:

Looking like a priestly hustler peddling indulgences.

Christina Onassis