Quotes About Aristotle

Aristotle says, To be happy means to be self-sufficient.

Akl? ba??nda ki?i ho? olan?n de?il, ac? vermeyenin pe?indedir. -Aristoteles, Nikomakhos

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

the North Pole, but to someone looking from the equator, it appears to lie just at the horizon. From the difference in the apparent position of the North Star in Egypt and Greece, Aristotle even quoted an estimate that the distance

Aristotle thought the earth was stationary and that the sun, the moon, the planets, and the stars moved in circular orbits about the earth.

As long ago as 340 B.C. the Greek philosopher Aristotle, in his book On the Heavens, was able to put forward two good arguments for believing that the earth was a round sphere rather than a flat plate.

The nonexistence of absolute rest therefore meant that one could not give an event an absolute position in space, as Aristotle had believed.

It is said that Galileo demonstrated that Aristotle's belief was false by dropping weights from the leaning tower of Pisa. The story is almost certainly untrue, but Galileo did do something equivalent: he rolled balls of different weights down a smooth slope.

Aristotle, and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it smacked too much of divine intervention.

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, "I did not give it to the man, but to humanity."

The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything," Aristotle wrote. "The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful disposition.

The doctrine of the mean (the epithet 'golden' is un-Aristotelian) regularly occurs in later writers as a piece of moral advice -- a recipe or rule reminding us to 'observe the mean', to be moderate in all things and to avoid excess and deciciency. (If the doctrine urges us not to drink too much wine, it equally urges us not to drink too little -- but that is something which the moralizers usually find it prudent to ignore.)

Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its "telos"—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife.

What makes human beings unique, says Aristotle, is our capacity to reason, and to use that reason to investigate the nature of the world and our purpose in it:

To Aristotle, "good" wasn't a subjective term, something for each of us to define for ourselves; "good" was a statement of objective fact. Something was "good" if it fulfilled its purpose. A good watch tells time; a good dog defends its master. What does a good human being do? Acts in accordance with right reason.

Like the Bible, Aristotle didn't define happiness as temporary joy. He saw happiness in a life well-lived.

The Founding Fathers were devotees of Cicero and Locke, of the Bible and Aristotle.

The reason the candle is currently in its state is because of something acting upon it. That something, in turn, is dependent on something else. But, Aquinas argues, that chain cannot continue forever; in the end, there must be a final cause, an Unmoved Mover standing behind things as they are.

Still, Rome was horrified by all this. The Vatican had "Christianized" the teachings of Aristotle, and not Plato. It preached that redemption could come only through the One Church. These Florentine ideas about the individual, about Art and Science, about universality, and about Greek and Jewish love were anathema and blasphemy…

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.

Remember what Aristotle said!" she cries. "Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers. And Horace!" Horace? "What did Horace say, Pithy?" "Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they're more certain they are their own.

We need both Socrates and Aristotle in the search for knowledge, but in education today there is too much Aristotle and too little Socrates.

Virtually everyone knows that Aristotle sometimes lies.

Since the time of Plato and Aristotle philosophers have had an interest in taking note of common fallacies in reasoning.