Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

The fashions of the ages vary in this direction and that, but they vary for the most part from a central road which was struck out by the imagination of Greece.

The fact is that much misunderstanding is often caused by our modern attempts to limit too strictly the meaning of a Greek word.

It is doubtless one of Aristotle's great services that he conceived so clearly the truth that literature is a thing that grows and has a history.

The average beast of prey is a decent creature who merely kills for the sake of food or in a fight against an enemy. It is only man who calls killing "sport" and kills for the pleasure of killing; not for food, not for self-defense, but just to satisfy some primitive instinct, once necessary and now perverted.

Sometimes Aristotle analyses his terms, but very often he takes them for granted; and in the latter case, I think, he is sometimes deceived by them.

Where words can be translated into equivalent words, the style of an original can be closely followed; but no translation which aims at being written in normal English can reproduce the style of Aristotle.