Quotes About Aristotle

What was Aristotle's life?' Well, the answer lay in a single sentence: 'He was born, he thought, he died.' And all the rest is pure anecdote.

The mass of mankind are evidently slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts.

Alexander the Great valued learning so highly, that he used to say he was more indebted to Aristotle for giving him knowledge than to his father Philip for life.

The Republic isn't as much fun as The Symposium. It's all long speeches, and nobody bursting in drunk to woo Socrates in the middle.

Maybe he [Plato] really couldn't imagine agape between men and women, and he thought agape between men wouldn't be affected by them going off to women at the festivals. Sokrates was married, and Aristotle, but never Plato.

Aristotle thought earthquakes were caused by winds trapped in subterranean caves. We're more scientific now, we know it's just five guys fracking the fuck out of the world while it's still legal.

The simplest way of understanding justice is giving people what they deserve. This idea goes back to Aristotle. The real difficulty begins with figuring out who deserves what and why.

It's fair to say that Wikipedia has spent far more time considering the philosophical ramifications of categorization than Aristotle and Kant ever did.

When I began writing novels, I read Aristotle to learn how to perfect structure, Pearl Cleage to sustain tension, and Nora Roberts for characterization.

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things.

Since the biblical God can truly be identified by narrative, his hypostatic being, his self-identity, is constituted in dramatic coherence. The classic definition of this sort of coherence is provided by Aristotle, who noticed that a good story is one in which events occur "unexpectedly but on account of each other" [Poetics 1452a3], so that before each decisive event we cannot predict it, but afterwards see it was just what had to happen.

Can stories as stories be true of reality other than that posited in the storytelling itself? Can Aristotle's criterion of a good story apply to nonfiction, as he himself did not think it did?

Character gives us qualities, but it is in actions—what we do—that we are happy or the reverse…. All human happiness and misery take the form of action. —ARISTOTLE Writing

Life is short, Hades is long. As Agathon says, you can't change the past, and as Aristotle says—paraphrasing—things are as they are, it's how we deal with them that counts.

I am courteous enough to assume that everyone in this so aesthetically voluptuous age, so potent and aroused that conception occurs as easily as with the partridge which, Aristotle says, needs only to hear the voice of the cock or its flight overhead - to assume that at the mere sound of the word 'concealment' everyone can easily shake a dozen romances and comedies from his sleeve.

It is a positive starting point for philosophy when Aristotle says that philosophy begins with wonder, not as in our day with doubt. Moreover the world will learn that the thing is not to begin with the negative, and the reason why it has succeeded up to the present is that it has never really given itself over to the negative, and so has never seriously done what it said. Its doubt is mere child's play.

Business or toil is merely utilitarian. It is necessary but does not enrich or ennoble a human life.

No matter what Aristotle and the Philosophers say, nothing is equal to tobacco; it's the passion of the well-bred, and he who lives without tobacco lives a life not worth living.

Happiness may be defined as good fortune joined to virtue, or a independence, or as a life that is both agreeable and secure.

For what [Aristotle] had done was to gather together all the knowledge of his time. He wrote about the natural sciences – the stars, animals and plants; about history and people living together in a state – what we call politics; about the right way to reason – logic; and the right way to behave – ethics.

the moral views now associated in the secularist mind with superstition and ignorance in fact follow inexorably from a consistent application of the metaphysical ideas we've traced back through Aquinas and the other Scholastic thinkers to Plato and Aristotle, the very greatest of the Greek founders of the Western intellectual tradition.

on using the word "physics" in the older sense. So as to forestall misunderstandings of the sort in question, it is better to acquiesce to the modern usage of "physics" and apply instead the label "philosophy of nature" to those aspects of Aristotle's account of the nature of the physical world that are still defensible today (as most contemporary Aristotelians and Thomists in fact do).

He understood that he needed the confidence of the people and, as the clear-eyed philosopher Aristotle put it, the "confidence of the people [depended] on hostility to the rich.

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.