Quotes About Aristotle

But for Aristotle the meaning was hidden in the particulars of experience. The scope of his work was itself witness to his belief in the unity of experience and his confidence that it could somehow be encompassed by the human mind. And so he confirms his axiom that the actuality of thought is life.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

In short, Aristotle destroys the soul in order to give it immortality; the immortal soul is pure thought, undefiled with reality, just as Aristotle's God is pure activity, undefiled with action. Let him who can, be comforted with this theology. One wonders sometimes whether this metaphysical eating of one's cake and keeping it is not Aristotle's subtle Way of saving himself from anti-Macedonian hemlock?

It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for him to be enthusiastic about anything. His motto is nil admirari - to admire or marvel at nothing.

Aristotle argued for slavery as natural and inevitable

Before Aristotle, science was in embryo; with him it was born.

Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to fancy everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar. It can take things up and lay them down again. It rouses us from our native dogmatic slumber and breaks up our caked prejudices.

Any space that distinguishes directions and accelerations cannot be "empty", in Aristotle's meaning.

The gravitational field of Earth will determine the direction of the rock that you drop from your hand. Aristotle concluded, from the simple fact that the rock "knows" in which direction to move, that space cannot be empty where it transmits that knowledge. Both Newton and Einstein would agree-the former because the gravitational field of Earth acts at the location of the rock, the latter because Earth's gravitational field actually curves space in that location.

Aristotle is generally credited (probably unreasonably) with holding up the progress of physics for about 2,000 years—until Galileo had the courage and the conviction to call him out.

This Aristotle knew definitely: the truth has the power to force or constrain men, all men alike, whether it be the great Parmenides and the great Alexander or Parmenides' unknown slave and the least of Alexander's stable-men

Aristotle wrote the 'Poetics' 2,400 years ago. It's really an instruction manual for aspiring filmmakers. It's as valid today as it was then.

A person's life persuades better than his word," said one of Aristotle's contemporaries.

He was particularly dissatisfied with Aristotle's insistence that tragedy should invariably depict the downfall of a flawed or 'middling' hero, insisting instead that what made a tragedy was the severity of the threat rather than the play's actual outcome.

Aristotle . . . said that men were not at all euqal by nature, since some were born for slavery and others born to be masters. Aristotle was right; but he mistook the effect for the cause . . . if there are slaves by nature, it is only because there has been slavery against nature. Force made the first slaves; and their cowardice perpetuates their slavery.

Aristotle believed democracy could exist only because of slavery, which gave citizens the leisure for higher pursuits. (Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

In December 1970, Aristotle Onassis tries to buy the Belfast ship-yard Harland and Woolf. Seven union leaders spend the night in Claridges at his expense. One of them says later that his bed was too soft.

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

Nothing seems to me more doubtful than Aristotle's remark that it is probable the arts and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times lost.

Specifically, Aristotle claims that no spatial extension (e.g. the intercurb interval AB) is 'actually infinite,' but that all such extensions are 'potentially infinite' in the sense of being infinitely divisible.

Live and die in Aristotle's works.

The greatest thinkers of Greece — Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and later Plutarch and Plotinus — derived their ideas from ancient tradition, and further on from divine revelation.

Aristotle taught that stars are made of a different matter than the four earthly elements— a quintessence— that also happens to be what the human psyche is made of. Which is why man's spirit corresponds to the stars. Perhaps that's not a very scientific view, but I do like the idea that there's a little starlight in each of us.

Derrida maintains that through three millenia of Western philosophy, from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau, Hegel, Husserl and others, philosophers have indeed privileged speech. What have they claimed?