Quotes from Aristotle

All learning is derived from things previously known.

By plot, I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.

Neglect of an effective birth control policy is a never-failing source of poverty which, in turn, is the parent of revolution and crime.

Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

The advantageous situation of the capital and of the territory is necessarily a part of the common stock; and all men who inhabit the same city and country must breathe the same air, and enjoy the same climate.

Wealth is clearly not the absolute good of which we are in search, for it is a utility, and only desirable as a means.

Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.

The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.

Children ... are unripe and imperfect; their virtues, therefore, are to be considered not merely as relative to their actual state, but principally in reference to that maturity and perfection to which nature has destined them.

Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type--not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly.

Now there are two ways in which fire outside the body can, as we see, come to an end, namely, exhaustion and extinction. By exhaustion we mean that termination which is produced by the fire itself; by extinction, that which is produced by the contraries of fire.

He then alone will strictly be called brave who is fearless of a noble death, and of all such chances as come upon us with sudden death in their train.

A man who has been well trained will not in any case look for more accuracy than the nature of the matter allows; for to expect exact demonstration from a rhetorician is as absurd as to accept from a mathematician a statement only probable.

The evil fortune of the living in no way affects the dead.

Nobility and worth are to be found only among the few, but their opposite among the many; for there is not one man of merit and high spirit in a hundred, while there are many destitute of both to be found everywhere.

The hand or foot, when separated from the body, retains indeed its name, but totally changes its nature, because it is completely divested of its uses and of its powers.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks to amend.

Change in all things is sweet.

If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.

The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.