Quotes from Aristotle

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

It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. The beginning of reform is not so much to equalize property as to train the noble sort of natures not to desire more, and to prevent the lower from getting more.

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.

While both [Plato and truth] are dear, piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

A sense is what has the power of receiving into itself the sensible forms of things without the matter, in the way in which a piece of wax takes on the impress of a signet-ring without the iron or gold.

Therefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is Nature's way.

It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.

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.

A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself… with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions.

Whether if soul did not exist time would exist or not, is a question that may fairly be asked for if there cannot be someone to count there cannot be anything that can be counted, so that evidently there cannot be number for number is either what has been, or what can be, counted.

Nature does nothing in vain.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

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

The state comes into existence for the sake of life and continues to exist for the sake of good life.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

It is possible to fail in many ways… while to succeed is possible only in one way (for which reason also one is easy and the other difficult—to miss the mark easy, to hit it difficult).

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

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that—agent and patient at once.

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.