Quotes About Aristotle

Aristotle insisted, the source of that justice is always the same: observation of the underlying order of nature.

Aristotle decided that Reality with a capital R is not (for the most part) something ultimately above or behind the world we see and hear and smell and touch. It is that world. What Plato had dismissed as the illusions of the cave, Aristotle set out to prove were the keys to ultimate understanding all along.

Aristotle, we must remember, was a doctor's son.

Hobbes puts the blame squarely on Aristotle, who he said led men to connect liberty with democracy and goaded them into "loving tumults" and disorder, believing those were the way to secure liberty when they did just the opposite. Instead, Hobbes argued, nothing was safe unless we obey the sovereign;

Aristotle is the true father of science and scientific method, by which we still mean a methodical process of observation, classification, and discovery.

Liberty included an equality before the law, since all men are equal before God; and it included a generosity of spirit and independence of mind that Aristotle had recognized as the hallmark of the virtuous man and which Locke saw would prevent a state of normal liberty from degenerating into a "state of license"—in other words, a perpetual riot.

Aristotle's theory of the mean seems simple-minded; or to quote Bertrand Russell again, common sense pedantically expressed. However, if we change the word mean to proportion, we get closer to what Aristotle must have meant—and large parts of his Ethics as well as his Politics make more sense. The mean represents not so much a literal middle point as striking a balance between conflicting impulses and choices, and seeing our way through to the other side.

Aristotle believed that the goal of political institutions was man's improvement rather than his perfection. He believed the way to do this was by encouraging each individual to realize his potential, rather than force him to submit to a collective order.

John Locke said that the place to start the study of how men behave was Aristotle.3 With a handful of exceptions, the Enlightenment followed his advice.

Aristotle's bias toward observation and classification also led him to break completely with the concept of Plato's Forms. He did so not only because they seemed too abstract and logically unwieldy,13 but because they missed certain essential features of reality.

One could say that Aristotle had turned Plato on his head. Instead of the individual being a pale copy of a more real abstract form, the universal is less real (indeed only a copy) of the individual.15 This reversal left Aristotle's philosophy with a built-in bias in favor of the individual: in science, in metaphysics, in ethics, and later in politics.

This is no new description of human nature. For eighteen hundred years Christendom has been amazed at the description in St. Paul of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind. Expressions most unlike in language, but not dissimilar in meaning, are to be found in some of the most familiar passages of Aristotle.

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

Prefería tener en la cabecera de su cama los 20 libros de Aristóteles encuadernados en negro o en rojo que vestidos lujosos, el violín y el salterio.

O Aristotle! if you had had the advantage of being the freshest modern instead of the greatest ancient, would you not have mingled your praise of metaphorical speech, as a sign of high intelligence, with a lamentation that intelligence so rarely shows itself in speech without metaphor,–that we can so seldom declare what a thing is, except by saying it is something else?

A line is not made up of points. ... In the same way, time is not made up parts considered as indivisible 'nows.' Part of Aristotle's reply to Zeno's paradox concerning continuity.

The Law is Reason free from Passion.

The weak are always anxious for justice and equality. The strong pay no heed to either.

Happiness belongs to the self-sufficient.

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.

Happiness is a quality of the soul...not a function of one's material circumstances.

He is happy who lives in accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a complete life.

Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.