Aristotle Philosophy Quotations

The end of labor is to gain leisure.

At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Philosophy can make people sick.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

In everything, it is no easy task to find the middle.

We must become just be doing just acts.

It is no easy task to be good.

If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.

Life in the true sense is perceiving or thinking.

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

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?

I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy,

But also philosophy is not about perceptible substances they, you see, are prone to destruction.

The life of theoretical philosophy is the best and happiest a man can lead. Few men are capable of it and then only intermittently. For the rest there is a second-best way of life, that of moral virtue and practical wisdom.

For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other should rather be called a Physiologist than a Poet.

The excellence of a thing is related to its proper function.

Philosophy is the science which considers truth.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Philosophy begins with wonder.

And this activity alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating, while from practical activities we gain more or less apart from the action. 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.