Quotes About Aristotle

Now if you have proofs to bring forward, bring them forward, and your moral discourse as well; if you have no enthymemes, then fall back upon moral discourse: after all, it is more fitting for a good man to display himself as an honest fellow than as a subtle reasoner.

si el alma se encuentra en todo cuerpo dotado de sensibilidad y si además suponemos que el alma es un cuerpo, necesariamente habrá dos cuerpos en el mismo lugar.

And therefore, if the earlier forms of society are natural, so is the state, for it is the end of them, and the [completed] nature is the end. For what each thing is when fully developed, we call its nature, whether we are speaking of a man, a horse, or a family. Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is the end and the best.

for the same things are not 'knowable relatively to us' and 'knowable' without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, (20) but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature.

Life is a gift of nature but beautiful living is the gift of wisdom.

Bad men, who are to weak for toil, are in love with death

Aristotle insists that habituation, not teaching, is the route to moral virtue (II. 1). We must practise doing good actions, not just read about virtue.

The proud man, then, is an extreme in respect of the greatness of his claims, but a mean in respect of the rightness of them; for he claims what is accordance with his merits, while the others go to excess or fall short.

Now there is a common division of goods into three classes; one being called external, the other two those of the soul and body respectively, and those belonging to the soul we call most properly and specially good. Well, in our definition we assume that the actions and workings of the soul constitute Happiness, and these of course belong to the soul.

logographos, a writer of speeches for others to use

The megalopsychos cannot let anyone else, except a friend, determine his life. For that would be slavish; and this is why all flatterers are servile and inferior people are flatterers.

The many, the most vulgar, would seem to conceive the good and happiness as pleasure, and hence they also like the life of gratification. Here they appear completely slavish, since the life they decide on is a life for grazing animals.

Besides which, the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy — Peripeteia or Reversal of the Situation, and Recognition scenes — are parts of the plot.

Again, it is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, to use Heraclitus' phrase', but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder;

The Ethics of Aristotle is one half of a single treatise of

Aristotle was to verge from his mentor in the Poetics, recognizing the light both tragic drama and epic poetry shed on the human condition.

Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they are, Pauson as less noble, Dionysius drew them true to life.

Poetry is more philosophical and more serious than history; poetry utters universal truths, history particular statements.

For the iambic is, of all measures, the most colloquial: we see it in the fact that conversational speech runs into iambic lines more frequently than into any other kind of verse; rarely into hexameters, and only when we drop the colloquial intonation.

and Euripides, faulty though he may be in the general management of his subject, yet is felt to be the most tragic of the poets.

exhaust the public revenues by giving pay for the performance of public duties; we must prevents the growth of a pauper

Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, (25) and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts.

Now to investigate whether Being is one and motionless is not a contribution to the science of Nature.

refuting a merely contentious argument—a description which applies to the arguments both of Melissus and of Parmenides: their premisses are false and their conclusions do not follow.