Top 1292 Quotes & Sayings by Aristotle - Page 19

It makes no difference whether a good man has defrauded a bad man, or a bad man defrauded a good man, or whether a good or bad man has committed adultery: the law can look only to the amount of damage done.

Rightness in our choice of an end is secured by [Moral] Virtue.

In a polity, each citizen is to possess his own arms, which are not supplied or owned by the state.

A state is an association of similar persons whose aim is the best life possible. What is best is happiness, and to be happy is an active exercise of virtue and a complete employment of it.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

That in the soul which is called the mind is, before it thinks, not actually any real thing.

I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed.

When a draco has eaten much fruit, it seeks the juice of the bitter lettuce; it has been seen to do this.

...happiness is an activity and a complete utilization of virtue, not conditionally but absolutely.

Bravery is a mean state concerned with things that inspire confidence and with things fearful ... and leading us to choose danger and to face it, either because to do so is noble, or because not to do so is base. But to court death as an escape from poverty, or from love, or from some grievous pain, is no proof of bravery, but rather of cowardice.

Laws, when good, should be supreme; and that the magistrate or magistrates should regulate those matters only on which the laws are unable to speak with precision owing to the difficulty of any general principle embracing all particulars.

Happiness is at once the best, the noblest, and the pleasantest of things.

So it is clear that the search for what is just is a search for the mean; for the law is the mean.

The greatest injustices proceed from those who pursue excess, not by those who are driven by necessity.

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

A life of wealth and many belongings is only a means to happiness. Honor, power, and success cannot be happiness because they depend on the whims of others, and happiness should be self-contained, complete in itself.

The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit.

But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study.

I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy.

The vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.

That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it

The democrats think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things.

The probable is what usually happens.

Youth should be kept strangers to all that is bad, and especially to things which suggest vice or hate. When the five years have passed away, during the two following years they must look on at the pursuits which they are hereafter to learn. There are two periods of life with reference to which education has to be divided, from seven to the age of puberty, and onwards to the age of one and twenty.

Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.

Now what is just and right is to be interpreted in the sense of 'what is equal'; and that which is right in the sense of being equal is to be considered with reference to the advantage of the state, and the common good of the citizens. And a citizen is one who shares in governing and being governed. He differs under different forms of government, but in the best state he is one who is able and willing to be governed and to govern with a view to the life of virtue.

Indeed, we may go further and assert that anyone who does not delight in fine actions is not even a good man.

If men think that a ruler is religious and has a reverence for the Gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands.

We cannot ... prove geometrical truths by arithmetic.

Nowadays, for the sake of the advantage which is to be gained from the public revenues and from office, men want to be always in office.

In justice is all virtues found in sum.

Man is the metre of all things, the hand is the instrument of instruments, and the mind is the form of forms.

Men agree that justice in the abstract is proportion, but they differ in that some think that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely, others that if they are unequal in any respect they should be unequal in all. The only stable principle of government is equality according to proportion, and for every man to enjoy his own.

What is common to many is least taken care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than what they possess in common with others.

The line has magnitude in one way, the plane in two ways, and the solid in three ways, and beyond these there is no other magnitude because the three are all.

The ridiculous is produced by any defect that is unattended by pain, or fatal consequences; thus, an ugly and deformed countenance does not fail to cause laughter, if it is not occasioned by pain.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

Time is the measurable unit of movement concerning a before and an after.

Let us be well persuaded that everyone of us possesses happiness in proportion to his virtue and wisdom, and according as he acts in obedience to their suggestion.

Legislative enactments proceed from men carrying their views a long time back; while judicial decisions are made off hand.

If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.

Anything whose presence or absence makes no discernible difference is no essential part of the whole.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

The high-minded man is fond of conferring benefits, but it shames him to receive them.

But the whole vital process of the earth takes place so gradually and in periods of time which are so immense compared with the length of our life, that these changes are not observed, and before their course can be recorded from beginning to end whole nations perish and are destroyed.

Memory is therefore, neither Perception nor Conception, but a state or affection of one of these, conditioned by lapse of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present, for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals which perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.

Quid quid movetur ab alio movetur"(nothing moves without having been moved).

There is a foolish corner in the brain of the wisest man.

We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses - in short, from fewer premises.

There is a cropping-time in the races of men, as in the fruits of the field; and sometimes, if the stock be good, there springs up for a time a succession of splendid men; and then comes a period of barrenness.

There must be in prudence also some master virtue.

In practical matters the end is not mere speculative knowledge of what is to be done, but rather the doing of it. It is not enough to know about Virtue, then, but we must endeavor to possess it, and to use it, or to take any other steps that may make.

In the human species at all events there is a great diversity of pleasures. The same things delight some men and annoy others, and things painful and disgusting to some are pleasant and attractive to others.

The vigorous are no better than the lazy during one half of life, for all men are alike when asleep.

A courageous person is one who faces fearful things as he ought and as reason directs for the sake of what is noble.

What has soul in it differs from what has not, in that the former displays life. Now this word has more than one sense, and provided any one alone of these is found in a thing we say that thing is living. Living, that is, may mean thinking or perception or local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth. Hence we think of plants also as living, for they are observed to possess in themselves an originative power through which they increase or decrease in all spatial directions.

If then it be possible that one contrary should exist, or be called into existence, the other contrary will also appear to be possible.

One has no friend who has many friends.

In all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause.