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Aristotle Quotes
384 BC–322 BC Greece
Aristotle (Ἀριστοτέλης Aristotelēs; 384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the teacher of Theophrastus and founder of the Lyceum, the Peripatetic school of philosophy, and the Aristotelian tradition.
Greece Academics Biologists Logicians Mathematicians Also known as: Nicomachean Ethics
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169 quotes
The wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him.
That which is desirable on its own account and for the sake of knowing it is more of the nature of wisdom than that which is desirable on account of its results.
But he who neither thinks for himself, nor lays to heart another's wisdom, this is a useless man.’
The best friend is he that, when he wishes a person's good, wishes it for that person's own sake.
When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.
We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
Aristotle's Psychology as translated by E. Wallace (1882)
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
Let this serve as an outline of the good; for we must presumably first sketch it roughly, and then later fill in the details.
We must as second best, as people say, take the least of the evils.
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
To be able without hindrance to exercise his preeminent quality, whatever its nature, is real happiness.
In general, people are more easily swayed by fear than inspired by reverence.
Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
A young man is not an appropriate hearer of lectures on political science; for he is inexperienced in the actions that occur in life.
It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.
The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks an end.
He who chooses to know for the sake of knowing will choose most readily that which is most truly knowledge.
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