Aristotle Quotes (367 Quotes)


    Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

    The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

    He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

    Boys should abstain from all use of wine until their eighteenth year, for it is wrong to add fire to fire.

    Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.


    We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us.

    It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible.

    In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

    Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

    Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.

    All that one gains by falsehood is, not to be believed when he speaks the truth

    What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions.

    It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

    The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

    Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.

    Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil - and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.

    Happiness depends upon ourselves.

    All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.

    For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements.

    The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

    Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.

    Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.

    Happiness is an expression of the soul in considered actions.

    The activity of happiness must occupy an entire lifetime for one swallow does not a summer make

    What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

    Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.

    Dissimilarity of habit tends more than anything to destroy affection.

    No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.


    Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.

    The poet's function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but the kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary.

    It is of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.

    The true end of tragedy is to purify the passions.

    The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.

    It is in justice that the ordering of society is centered.

    It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

    It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

    The bad man is continually at war with, and in opposition to, himself

    And it is characteristic of man that he alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like, and the association of living beings who have this sense makes family and a state.

    There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man to be virtuous.

    Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness.

    He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

    Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.

    Ancient laws remain in force long after the people have the power to change them.

    A proper wife should be as obedient as a slave.... The female is a female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities a natural defectiveness.

    It was through the feeling of wonder that men now and at first began to philosophize.

    One swallow does not make a summer.

    Young people are in a condition like permanent intoxication, because youth is sweet and they are growing.

    It is possible to fail in many ways ... while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult).

    No one will dare maintain that it is better to do injustice than to bear it.


    Related Authors


    Sun Tzu - Francis Bacon - Confucius - Michel de Montaigne - Democritus - Charles de Montesquieu - Blaise Pascal - Baron de Montesquieu - Avicenna - Anaxagoras


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