Quotes from Aristotle

Correct habituation distinguishes a good political system from a bad one.

Moral experience—the actual possession and exercise of good character—is necessary truly to understand moral principles and profitably to apply them. The mere intellectual apprehension of them is not possible, or if possible, profitless.

Being will not have magnitude, if it is substance. For each of the two parts must be in a different sense.

for we are noble in only one way, but bad in all sorts of ways.

Hence poetry implies either a happy gift of nature or a strain of madness. In the one case a man can take the mould of any character; in the other, he is lifted out of his proper self.

It is, (10) then, clearly impossible for Being to be one in this sense.

Every tragedy falls into two parts, — Complication and Unravelling or Denouement.

The first set make the underlying body one—either one of the three5 or something else which is denser than fire and rarer than air—then generate everything else from this, (15) and obtain multiplicity by condensation and rarefaction. Now these are contraries, which may be generalized into 'excess and defect'.

Aristotle states that only one thing could justify monarchy, and that was if the virtue of the king and his family were greater than the virtue of the rest of the citizens put together. Tactfully

There are four kinds of Tragedy, the Complex, depending entirely on Reversal of the Situation and Recognition; the Pathetic (where the motive is passion), — such as the tragedies on Ajax and Ixion; the Ethical (where the motives are ethical), — such as the Phthiotides and the Peleus.

Algunos creen q para ser amigos basta con querer, como si para estar sanos bastara con desear buena salud

The Chorus too should be regarded as one of the actors; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action, in the manner not of Euripides but of Sophocles.

I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Someone is a king only if he is self-sufficient and superior in all goods; and since such a person needs nothing more, he will consider the subjects' benefit, not his own. . . . Tyranny is contrary to this; for the tyrant pursues his own good.

Lastly (4) in each of his infinite bodies there would be already present infinite flesh and blood and brain—having a distinct existence, however, from one another, and no less real than the infinite bodies, and each infinite: which is contrary to reason.

The statement that complete separation never will take place is correct enough, (5) though Anaxagoras is not fully aware of what it means. For affections are indeed inseparable. If then colours and states had entered into the mixture, and if separation took place, there would be a 'white' or a 'healthy' which was nothing but white or healthy, i. e. was not the predicate of a subject.

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.

It is plain then that they all in one way or another identify the contraries with the principles. And with good reason. For first principles must not be derived from one another nor from anything else, while everything has to be derived from them. But these conditions are fulfilled by the primary contraries, which are not derived from anything else because they are primary, nor from each other because they are contraries.

Change in an art is not like change in law; for law has no strength with respect to obedience apart from habit, and this is not created except over a period of time. Hence the easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself.

Our first presupposition must be that in nature nothing acts on, or is acted on by, any other thing at random, nor may anything come from anything else, unless we mean that it does so in virtue of a concomitant attribute.

Men were first led to the study of philosophy, as indeed they are today, by wonder.

A vowel is that which without impact of tongue or lip has an audible sound.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason is the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time as learning— gathering the meaning of things