Aristotle Quotes

The trade of the petty usurer is hated with most reason: it makes a profit from currency itself, instead of making it from the process which currency was meant to serve. Their common characteristic is obviously their sordid avarice.

The light of the day is followed by night, as a shadow follows a body.

The laws are, and ought to be, relative to the constitution, and not the constitution to the laws. A constitution is the organization of offices in a state, and determines what is to be the governing body, and what is the end of each community. But laws are not to be confounded with the principles of the constitution; they are the rules according to which the magistrates should administer the state, and proceed against offenders.

All human happiness and misery take the form of action.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly worthless.

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.

Some believe it to be just friends wanting, as if to be healthy enough to wish health.

Art takes nature as its model.

If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

But then in what way are things called good? They do not seem to be like the things that only chance to have the same name. Are goods one then by being derived from one good or by all contributing to one good, or are they rather one by analogy? Certainly as sight is in the body, so is reason in the soul, and so on in other cases.

Excellence or virtue in a man will be the disposition which renders him a good man and also which will cause him to perform his function well.

Whether we will philosophize or we won't philosophize, we must philosophize.

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

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

Suppose, then, that all men were sick or deranged, save one or two of them who were healthy and of right mind. It would then be the latter two who would be thought to be sick and deranged and the former not!

Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good.

We make war that we may live in peace.

What you have to learn to do, you learn by doing.

For as the interposition of a rivulet, however small, will occasion the line of the phalanx to fluctuate, so any trifling disagreement will be the cause of seditions; but they will not so soon flow from anything else as from the disagreement between virtue and vice, and next to that between poverty and riches.

In all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause.

We have no evidence as yet about mind or the power to think; it seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers.

Those who cannot bravely face danger are the slaves of their attackers.

In revolutions the occasions may be trifling but great interest are at stake.

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes.

Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.

True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person.

The good lawgiver should inquire how states and races of men and communities may participate in a good life, and in the happiness which is attainable by them.

It is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize; wondering in the first place at obvious perplexities, and then by gradual progression raising questions about the greater matters too.

No man of high and generous spirit is ever willing to indulge in flattery; the good may feel affection for others, but will not flatter them.

Each human being is bred with a unique set of potentials that yearn to be fulfilled as surely as the acorn yearns to become the oak within it.

Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.

A man becomes a friend whenever being loved he loves in return.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.

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

The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own.

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

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.

Friendship is a thing most necessary to life, since without friends no one would choose to live, though possessed of all other advantages.

For that which has become habitual, becomes as it were natural.

Maybe crying is a means of cleaning yourself out emotionally. Or maybe it's your last resort; the only way to express yourself when words fail, the same as when you were a baby and had no words.

Change in all things is sweet.

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.

We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.

The hand is the tool of tools.

That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.

Let us first understand the facts and then we may seek the cause.

Actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

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.

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

There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.

Friends hold a mirror up to each other; through that mirror they can see each other in ways that would not otherwise be accessible to them, and it is this mirroring that helps them improve themselves as persons.

Man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.

It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.

Although it may be difficult in theory to know what is just and equal, the practical difficulty of inducing those to forbear who can, if they like, encroach, is far greater, for the weaker are always asking for equality and justice, but the stronger care for none of these things.