Quotes About Aristotle

And therefore this is another error of Aristotle's politics, that in a well-ordered commonwealth, not men should govern, but the laws. What man, that has his natural senses, though he can neither write nor read, does not find himself governed by them he fears, and believes can kill or hurt him when he obeyeth not? Or that believes the law can hurt him; that is, words and paper, without the hands and swords of men?

The word logos itself is a prime example, beginning its history as a word charged with religious power, and referring to the word of wisdom and truth. By the time of Aristotle, logos had lost its philosophical connotations and had come to mean the "study of" something: biology, the study of life; zoology, the study of animal forms; and theology, the study of God.

St. Thomas himself recalls the saying of Aristotle that "the thing is the whiter, the less it is mixed with black,"45 without mentioning, however, that the reverse proposition: "the thing is the blacker, the less it is mixed with white," not only has the same validity as the first but is also its logical equivalent. He might also have mentioned that not only darkness is known through light, but that, conversely, light is known through darkness.

The failure of Aristotle to distinguish sharply between the worlds of experience and of mathematical thought resulted in his lack of clear recognition of a similar confusion in the paradoxes of Zeno.

Recognizing that geometry is entirely intellectual and independent of the actual description and existence of figures, Fontenelle did not discuss the subject fro the point of view of science or metaphysics as had Aristotle and Leibnez.

The object of government," wrote Madison in Federalist 62, is "the happiness of the people."29 He and his fellow Founders conceived of happiness as Aristotle did, as a durable state of worthy satisfaction with life. To be worthy, satisfaction must flow from the vigorous employment of the faculties that make us human: individual reasoning and social participation. Happiness, therefore, is an activity.

Nijedna savršena duša nije lišena neke mešavine ludila. Aristotel

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

David Milch, twice I got lectures from him about the theory of writing. I told my wife one night when I got home, 'I feel like I'm being paid to sit at the feet of Aristotle.'

Newton wrote, "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas." That is Latin for, "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth." When

In his scientific notebook, Newton wrote, "Amicus Plato amicus Aristoteles magis amica veritas." That is Latin for, "Plato is my friend, Aristotle is my friend, but my best friend is truth.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

Aristotle said that only two living entities are capable of complete solitude and complete separateness: God and beast. Because of this the most acute form of suffering for human beings is loneliness.

as Plato and his pupil Aristotle understood, the building of empire, any empire, extinguishes democracy. Empire requires a centralized bureaucracy. Its complexity mandates a permanent caste of bureaucrats and military leaders who strip the citizenry of power.

Aristotle warned that in a democracy, there always existed the potential for the poor to seize the property of the rich. Democracy, Aristotle wrote, could not coexist with huge levels of inequality. Everyone had to have a stake in society. There were other responses to Aristotle's understanding, including from Athenian tyrants and later James Madison, who urged government to reduce democracy and cripple the political power of the working class.

There were no musicians or dancers, for Plato believed that educated men ought to be capable of entertaining themselves by speaking and listening in turns in an orderly manner.

Aristotle observed more than 2,400 years ago, "There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.

Those who criticize the usefulness of philosophy for science, Aristotle has noticed, are not doing science: they are doing philosophy.

Time, as Aristotle suggested, is the measure of change;

Perhaps the rivers of ink that have been expended discussing the nature of the "continuous" over the centuries, from Aristotle to Heidegger, have been wasted. Continuity is only a mathematical technique for approximating very finely grained things. The world is subtly discrete, not continuous. The good Lord has not drawn the world with continuous lines: with a light hand, he has sketched it in dots, like the painter Georges Seurat.

Aristotle is the first we are aware of to have asked himself the question "What is time?," and he came to the following conclusion: time is the measurement of change.

was Aristotle who said it: "All human actions have one or more of seven causes," and then he named them: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Aristotle, on the other hand, saw poetry as having a positive value: "It is a great thing, indeed, to make proper use of the poetic forms, . . . But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor" (Poetics 1459a); "ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh" (Rhetoric 1410b).

Melancholy men are of all others the most witty.