Aristotle Quotes

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

It seems that ambition makes most people wish to be loved rather than to love others.

Those who act receive the prizes.

Authority is no source for Truth.

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

He who hath many friends hath none.

The male has more teeth than the female in mankind, and sheep and goats, and swine. This has not been observed in other animals. Those persons which have the greatest number of teeth are the longest lived; those which have them widely separated, smaller, and more scattered, are generally more short lived.

When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.

Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

Anybody can get hit over the head.

People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life.

The greatest victory is over self.

When you have thrown a stone, you cannot afterwards bring it back again, but nevertheless you are responsible for having taken up the stone and flung it, for the origin of the act was within you. Similarly the unjust and profligate might at the outset have avoided becoming so, and therefore they are so voluntarily, although when they have become unjust and profligate it is no longer open to them not to be so.

The one exclusive sign of thorough knowledge is the power of teaching.

Meanness is incurable; it cannot be cured by old age, or by anything else.

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

The unfortunate need people who will be kind to them; the prosperous need people to be kind to.

A gentleman is not disturbed by anything

Actual knowledge is identical with its object: in the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge, but in the universe as a whole it is not prior even in time. Mind is not at one time knowing and at another not. When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks.

But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.

He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them.

The first principle of all action is leisure.

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.

A friend is a second self.

Those who merely possess the goods of fortune may be haughty and insolent; . . . they try to imitate the great-souled man without being really like him, and only copy him in what they can, reproducing his contempt for others but not his virtuous conduct. For the great-souled man is justified in despising other people - his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride.

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

Everybody loves a thing more if it has cost him trouble: for instance those who have made money love money more than those who have inherited it.

We are what we frequently do.

Those whose days are consumed in the low pursuits of avarice, or the gaudy frivolties of fashion, unobservant of nature's lovelinessof demarcation, nor on which side thereof an intermediate form should lie.

Virtue makes us aim at the right end, and practical wisdom makes us take the right means.

We are what we repeatedly do.

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.

When their adventures do not succeed, however, they run away; but it was the mark of a brave man to face things that are, and seem, terrible for a man, because it is noble to do so and disgraceful not to do so.

Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

Money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.

In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference.

Aristocracy is that form of government in which education and discipline are qualifications for suffrage and office holding.

Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

Find the good. Seek the Unity. Ignore the divisions among us.

Greatness of Soul seems therefore to be as it were a crowning ornament of the virtues; it enhances their greatness, and it cannot exist without them. Hence it is hard to be truly great-souled, for greatness of soul is impossible without moral nobility.

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

Character is determined by choice, not opinion.

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.

Happiness is the reward of virtue.

In most constitutional states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all.

This body is not a home, but an inn; and that only for a short time. Seneca Friendship is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

The energy or active exercise of the mind constitutes life.

Good has two meanings: it means that which is good absolutely and that which is good for somebody.