Aristotle Quotes

Actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

Law is mind without reason.

Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

We should aim rather at leveling down our desires than leveling up our means.

A friend is a second self.

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

A goal gets us motivated,while a good habit keeps us stay motivated.

All men by nature desire knowledge.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

The complete man must work, study and wrestle.

People do not naturally become morally excellent or practically wise. They become so, if at all, only as the result of lifelong personal and community effort.

Revolutions are not about trifles, but spring from trifles.

To love someone is to identify with them.

Your happiness depends on you alone.

Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

Philosophy can make people sick.

Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.

The first principle of all action is leisure.

There's many a slip between the cup and the lip.

How many a dispute could have been deflated into a single paragraph if the disputants had dared to define their terms

The only way to achieve true success is to express yourself completely in service to society.

Money is a guarantee that we may have what we want in the future. Though we need nothing at the moment it insures the possibility of satisfying a new desire when it arises.

Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency.

Imagination is a sort of faint perception.

The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul.

There also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet in a manner participates in rational principle.

The soul is characterized by these capacities; self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and movement.

[this element], the seat of the appetites and of desire in general, does in a sense participate in principle, as being amenable and obedient to it

[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed.

The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction

Evil draws men together.

In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.

A person's life persuades better than his word.

For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.

It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients.

The man with a host of friends who slaps on the back everybody he meets is regarded as the friend of nobody.

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.

Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.

When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence.

Time crumbles things; everything grows old under the power of Time and is forgotten through the lapse of Time.

Love well, be loved and do something of value.

Nature operates in the shortest way possible.

Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice.

Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.

All persons ought to endeavor to follow what is right, and not what is established.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case.

A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.