Aristotle Quotes

It is our actions and the soul's active exercise of its functions that we posit (as being Happiness).

[Hope is] the dream of a waking man.

We are what we continually do.

It is simplicity that makes the uneducated more effective than the educated when addressing popular audiences.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

The soul never thinks without a picture.

Greatness of spirit is accompanied by simplicity and sincerity.

If there is any kind of animal which is female and has no male separate from it, it is possible that this may generate a young one from itself. No instance of this worthy of any credit has been observed up to the present at any rate, but one case in the class of fishes makes us hesitate. No male of the so-called erythrinus has ever yet been seen, but females, and specimens full of roe, have been seen. Of this, however, we have as yet no proof worthy of credit.

Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age, and men at seven and thirty; then they are in the prime of life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.

We maintain, and have said in the Ethics, if the arguments there adduced are of any value, that happiness is the realization and perfect exercise of virtue, and this not conditional, but absolute. And I used the term 'conditional' to express that which is indispensable, and 'absolute' to express that which is good in itself.

It [Justice] is complete virtue in the fullest sense, because it is the active exercise of complete virtue; and it is complete because its possessor can exercise it in relation to another person, and not only by himself.

Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.

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

Of the tyrant, spies and informers are the principal instruments. War is his favorite occupation, for the sake of engrossing the attention of the people, and making himself necessary to them as their leader.

Talent is culture with insolence.

But is it just then that the few and the wealthy should be the rulers? And what if they, in like manner, rob and plunder the people, - is this just?

A change in the shape of the body creates a change in the state of the soul.

Excellence or virtue is a settled disposition of the mind that determines our choice of actions and emotions and consists essentially in observing the mean relative to us ... a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.

A good man may make the best even of poverty and disease, and the other ills of life; but he can only attain happiness under the opposite conditions

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause.

Friendship also seems to be the bond that hold communities together.

Not to know of what things one should demand demonstration, and of what one should not, argues want of education.

The real difference between democracy and oligarchy is poverty and wealth. Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy.

Nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for.

No one who desires to become good will become good unless he does good things.

Of old, the demagogue was also a general, and then democracies changed into tyrannies. Most of the ancient tyrants were originally demagogues. They are not so now, but they were then; and the reason is that they were generals and not orators, for oratory had not yet come into fashion.

There is an error common to both oligarchies and to democracies: in the latter the demagogues, when the multitude are above the law, are always cutting the city in two by quarrels with the rich, whereas they should always profess to be maintaining their cause; just as in oligarchies the oligarchs should profess to maintain the cause of the people, . .

It would be wrong to put friendship before the truth.

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

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

A bad man can do a million times more harm than a beast.

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

Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.

What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.

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

Actions determine what kind of characteristics are developed.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

A promise made must be a promise kept.

A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.

It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.

For through wondering human beings now and in the beginning have been led to philosophizing.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.

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

For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result.

Happiness is a state of activity.