Quotes About Aristotle

Good cannot be a single and universal general notion; if it were, it would not be predictable in all the categories, but only in one.

And here will apply an observation made before, that whatever is proper to each is naturally best and pleasantest to him: such then is to Man the life in accordance with pure Intellect (since this Principle is most truly Man), and if so, then it is also the happiest.

The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of which his Politics is the other half. Both deal with one and the same subject. This subject is what Aristotle calls in one place the philosophy of human affairs; but more frequently Political or Social Science.

By the way, a question is sometimes raised, whether the moral choice or the actions have most to do with Virtue, since it consists in both: it is plain that the perfection of virtuous action requires both: but for the actions many things are required, and the greater and more numerous they are the more.)

the Good of Man comes to be "a working of the Soul in the way of Excellence," or, if Excellence admits of degrees, in the way of the best and most perfect Excellence.

Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.

Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.

Happiness also requires external goods in addition.

Rhetoric then may be defined as the faculty of discovering the possible means of persuasion in reference to any subject whatever.

The same distinction marks off Tragedy from Comedy; for Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life. III

rhetoric was to be surveyed from the standpoint of philosophy.

All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem.

A sign of this is what happens (10) in our actions, for we delight in contemplating the most accurately made images of the very things that are painful for us to see, such as the forms of the most contemptible insects and of dead bodies.

For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.

Now since shame is a mental picture of disgrace, in which we shrink from the disgrace itself and not from its consequences, and we only care what opinion is held of us because of the people who form that opinion, it follows that the people before whom we feel shame are those whose opinion of us matters to us.

Happiness requires both complete goodness and a complete lifetime.

Being cannot be one in form, though it may be in what it is made of. (Even some of the physicists hold it to be one in the latter way, though not in the former.) Man obviously differs from horse in form, and contraries from each other.

None of the moral virtues is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas

A well constructed plot should, therefore, be single in its issue, rather than double as some maintain. The change of fortune should be not from bad to good, but, reversely, from good to bad.

Nevertheless, Rhetoric is useful, because the true and the just are naturally superior to their opposites, so that, if decisions are improperly made, they must owe their defeat to their own advocates; which is reprehensible.

The present work is, then, the masterpiece of one particular literary genre that flourished in the fourth century BC in Greece, that of the rhetorical manual, and it is a remarkable fact that it should have fallen to Aristotle to write it. It

The best kind of friendship, he maintains, is friendship with those to whom we wish well and with whom we can spend time in shared valuable activities, all because of their virtue.