Quotes About Aristotle

Alexander offered him (Aristotle)a hand to mount the gangplank, and tried the effect of a smile. When the man returned it, it could be seen that smiling was what he would do best; he would not often be caught with his head back laughing. But he did look like a man who would answer questions.

For Aristotle, then, the idea of the flourishing life cannot be disentangled from that of the balanced one, and the person who pursues moral virtue at the expense of all else—who views moral considerations as always overriding of all others—is by definition one whose life is unbalanced.

The eudaimonic life, for Aristotle, is one in which we have lived to the fullness of our potential; developed our distinctive capacities to their finest points; and accomplished in the world what we have set out to do.

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of 'the wise choice of many alternatives'.

She remembered studying Aristotle as a first-year Philosophy student. And being a bit depressed by his idea that excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of 'the wise choice of many alternatives

Theophilos, the light of reason that we both reverence is not a god. Neither does the highest development of the human mind confer divinity upon us. We may quote Aristotle one moment and in the next find ourselves betraying our wives and children—for the sake of passion, in the name of love—and not know how we arrived at that lamentable state. Reason is a gift of God but of itself cannot ennoble a man.

Science was completely wrong to jettison the ideas of Plato and Aristotle and will have to return to them if it is ever to formulate the Grand Unified Theory of Everything.

Education is the best provision for old age. — ARISTOTLE

The most obvious reason for giving the best flutes to the best flute players is that doing so will produce the best music, making us listeners better off. But this is not Aristotle's reason. He thinks the best flutes should go to the best flute players because that's what flutes are for—to be played well.

For Aristotle, politics is about something higher. It's about learning how to live a good life.

In other words, we can ground human values and morals not just in philosophical principles such as Aristotle's virtue ethics, Kant's categorical imperative, Mill's utilitarianism, or Rawls's fairness ethics, but in science as well.

Aristotle tells us that the plot should be so tight that if you took away any one incident, the whole would literally collapse:

TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy.

Aristotle defined a first principle as "the first basis from which a thing is known." First principles thinking is therefore the art of breaking a problem down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there.

Para Aristóteles, el poder, la riqueza y las amistades eran los tres elementos que constituían la felicidad de una persona.

For Aristotle, power along with wealth and friendships were the three components that added up to a person's happiness.

Aristóteles, el poder, la riqueza y las amistades eran los tres elementos que constituían la felicidad de una persona. La

Aristotle says, "Now what is characteristic of any nature is that which is best for it and gives most joy. Such to man is the life according to reason, since it is that which makes him man.

The Galileo saga is typically told as a conflict between science and religion. But in reality it was a conflict among Christians over the correct philosophy of nature. Was it Aristotle's quality or Galileo's quantity? Galileo's victory was the triumph of the idea that the nature is constructed on a mathematical blueprint.

It's easy, today, to chuckle at Aristotle's error. But it's also easy to understand how the great philosopher was led so far astray. The brain, packed neatly into the bone-crate of the skull, gives us no sensory signal of its existence. We feel our heart beat, our lungs expand, our stomach churn—but our brain, lacking motility and having no sensory nerve endings, remains imperceptible to us. The source of consciousness lies beyond the grasp of consciousness.

Die marxistische Soziologie ist die aristotelische Physik der Sozialwissenschaften.

May I remark that all we possess of Aristotle is what amounts to the school notebooks of his disciples, written in one of the most crabbed technical jargons in the history of the world, and totally unintelligible to any contemporary Greek who had not been through the discipline of the Lyceum? That this jargon has been sanctified by history, so that it has become itself an object of classical education, is not relevant; for this happened after Aristotle, not contemporaneously with him.

In ethics [Aristotle] had two bright ideas. First, that extreme behavior of selfishness and self-sacrifice don't work for most people; look for the golden mean. Second, good behavior is not a result of either sudden inspiration or harsh control. It is a habitual pattern, which means slow and steady conditioning: 'One swallow does not make a summer,' nor does one good deed make ethical behavior.

If the philosophy of the Middle Ages is based on the logic of Aristotle, their science can be traced rather to the Greek thought of pre-Aristotelian times. For authority it relied very largely on a single dialogue of Plato, to which may be added Latin translations of a small part of Hippocrates, and of his post-Christian successor and interpreter, Galen.