Aristotle Quotations | Page 4

Our characters are the result of our conduct.

They - Young People have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things - and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning - all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything - they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.

It is clear that there is some difference between ends: some ends are energeia [energy], while others are products which are additional to the energeia.

One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day.

The intention makes the crime.

People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.

Whether we call it sacrifice, or poetry, or adventure, it is always the same voice that calls.

They who are to be judges must also be performers.

Human beings are curious by nature.

We deliberate not about ends, but about means.

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.

Nor was civil society founded merely to preserve the lives of its members; but that they might live well: for otherwise a state might be composed of slaves, or the animal creation... nor is it an alliance mutually to defend each other from injuries, or for a commercial intercourse. But whosoever endeavors to establish wholesome laws in a state, attends to the virtues and vices of each individual who composes it; from whence it is evident, that the first care of him who would found a city, truly deserving that name, and not nominally so, must be to have his citizens virtuous.

The vigorous are no better than the lazy during one half of life, for all men are alike when asleep.

We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.

The law does not expressly permit suicide, and what it does not permit it forbids.

They who have drunk beer, fall on their back, but there is a peculiarity in the effects of the drink made from barley, for they that get drunk on other intoxicating liquors fall on all parts of their body, they fall on the left side, on the right side, on their faces, and and on their backs. But it is only those who get drunk on beer that fall on their backs with their faces upward.

For often, when one is asleep, there is something in consciousness which declares that what then presents itself is but a dream.

We ought, so far as it lies within our power, to aspire to immortality, and do all that we can to live in conformity with the highest that is within us; for even if it is small in quantity, in power and preciousness, it far excels all the rest.

The sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth. This, as we have said before, is the regular course of nature.

When quarrels and complaints arise, it is when people who are equal have not got equal shares, or vice-versa.

He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave.

To learn is a natural pleasure, not confined to philosophers, but common to all men.

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a questionable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.

Whereas the law is passionless, passion must ever sway the heart of man.

Men cling to life even at the cost of enduring great misfortune.

Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.

Why do men seek honour? Surely in order to confirm the favorable opinion they have formed of themselves.

Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.

A speaker who is attempting to move people to thought or action must concern himself with Pathos.

Knowing what is right does not make a sagacious man.

When we deliberate it is about means and not ends.

The appropriate age for marrige is around eighteen and thirty-seven for man

The same ideas, one must believe, recur in men's minds not once or twice but again and again.

Patience is so like fortitude that she seems either her sister or her daughter.

And yet the true creator is necessity, which is the mother of invention.

This much then, is clear: in all our conduct it is the mean that is to be commended.

At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

The energy or active exercise of the mind constitutes life.

The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine.

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

There is more evidence to prove that saltness [of the sea] is due to the admixture of some substance, besides that which we have adduced. Make a vessel of wax and put it in the sea, fastening its mouth in such a way as to prevent any water getting in. Then the water that percolates through the wax sides of the vessel is sweet, the earthy stuff, the admixture of which makes the water salt, being separated off as it were by a filter.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end.

For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result.

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.

Now, the causes being four, it is the business of the student of nature to know about them all, and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the "why" in the way proper to his science-the matter, the form, the mover, that for the sake of which.

...we are all inclined to ... direct our inquiry not by the matter itself, but by the views of our opponents; and, even when interrogating oneself, one pushes the inquiry only to the point at which one can no longer offer any opposition. Hence a good inquirer will be one who is ready in bringing forward the objections proper to the genus, and that he will be when he has gained an understanding of the differences.

Men create the gods after their own images.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

The line between lawful and unlawful abortion will be marked by the fact of having sensation and being alive.

Of mankind in general, the parts are greater than the whole.

Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.

Those who have the command of the arms in a country are masters of the state, and have it in their power to make what revolutions they please. [Thus,] there is no end to observations on the difference between the measures likely to be pursued by a minister backed by a standing army, and those of a court awed by the fear of an armed people.

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses ...

What soon grows old? Gratitude.

Quitting smoking is rather a marathon than a sprint. It is not a one-time attempt, but a longer effort

Today you can start forming habits for overcoming all obstacles in life... even nicotine cravings

Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may in the evening of his days meet with great misfortunes.

Humility is a flower which does not grow in everyone's garden.

Modesty is hardly to be described as a virtue. It is a feeling rather than a disposition. It is a kind of fear of falling into disrepute.

Happiness is the highest good

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.

You are what you repeatedly do

Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

... the good for man is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, or if there are more kinds of virtue than one, in accordance with the best and most perfect kind.

So virtue is a purposive disposition, lying in a mean that is relative to us and determined by a rational principle, and by that which a prudent man would use to determine it. It is a mean between two kinds of vice, one of excess and the other of deficiency...

It [Justice] is complete virtue in the fullest sense, because it is the active exercise of complete virtue; and it is complete because its possessor can exercise it in relation to another person, and not only by himself.

...virtue is not merely a state in conformity with the right principle, but one that implies the right principle; and the right principle in moral conduct is prudence.

For contemplation is both the highest form of activity (since the intellect is the highest thing in us, and the objects that it apprehends are the highest things that can be known), and also it is the most continuous, because we are more capable of continuous contemplation than we are of any practical activity.

Happiness, then, is co-extensive with contemplation, and the more people contemplate, the happier they are; not incidentally, but in virtue of their contemplation, because it is in itself precious. Thus happiness is a form of contemplation.

It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

Men in general desire the good and not merely what their fathers had.

Being a father is the most rewarding thing a man whose career has plateaued can do.

Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.

Those that deem politics beneath their dignity are doomed to be governed by those of lesser talents.

A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must not be mean or above the dignity of the subject. It must be appropriate.

"I was not alone when I was in Goofy hell"

A state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. . . .Political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not mere companionship.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art.

Those whose days are consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolties of fashion, unobservant of nature's lovelinessof demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.

Pay attention to the young, and make them just as good as possible.

Conscientious and careful physicians allocate causes of disease to natural laws, while the ablest scientists go back to medicine for their first principles.

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

The true nature of anything is what it becomes at its highest.

No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.

Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

So it is naturally with the male and the female; the one is superior, the other inferior; the one governs, the other is governed; and the same rule must necessarily hold good with respect to all mankind.

Anaximenes and Anaxagoras and Democritus say that its [the earth's] flatness is responsible for it staying still: for it does not cut the air beneath but covers it like a lid, which flat bodies evidently do: for they are hard to move even for the winds, on account of their resistance.

But the whole vital process of the earth takes place so gradually and in periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are destroyed.

It is clear that the earth does not move, and that it does not lie elsewhere than at the center.

If there is any kind of animal which is female and has no male separate from it, it is possible that this may generate a young one from itself. No instance of this worthy of any credit has been observed up to the present at any rate, but one case in the class of fishes makes us hesitate. No male of the so-called erythrinus has ever yet been seen, but females, and specimens full of roe, have been seen. Of this, however, we have as yet no proof worthy of credit.