Quotes About Philosophy

The many are more incorruptible than the few; they are like the greater quantity of water which is less easily corrupted than a little.

The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.

The cultivation of the intellect is man's highest good and purest happiness

What makes a man a 'sophist' is not his faculty, but his moral purpose. (1355b 17)

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness. - Aristotle (Attributed by Seneca in Moral Essays, De Tranquillitate Animi On Tranquility of Mind, sct. 17, subsct. 10.)

For the activity of the mind is life

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon

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

The ideal man bears the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances. — Aristotle

It is impossible that there should be demonstration of absolutely everything; [for then] there would be an infinite regress, so that there would still be no demonstration.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

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.

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.

Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, that which all things aim at.

The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary...Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.

No more will there be any difference between 'the ideal good' and 'good' in so far as both are good.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

The void is 'not-being,' and no part of 'what is' is a 'not-being,'; for what 'is' in the strict sense of the term is an absolute plenum. This plenum, however, is not 'one': on the contrary, it is a 'many' infinite in number and invisible owing to the minuteness of their bulk.

Virtue is a greater good than honour; and one might perhaps accordingly suppose that virtue rather than honour is the end of the political life.

Wisdom or intelligence and prudence are intellectual, liberality and temperance are moral virtues.

Even a woman may be good, and also a slave; though the woman may be said to be an inferior being, and the slave quite worthless.

In everything continuous and divisible, it is possible to grasp the more, the less, and the equal, and these either in reference to the thing itself, or in relation to us.

But to be constantly asking 'What is the use of it?' is unbecoming to those of broad vision and unworthy of free men.