All Quotes

"Evils draw men together."

"Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite."

"The young have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things—and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning.... All their mistakes are due to excess and vehemence and their neglect of the maxim of Chilon [The maxim was Μηδὲν ἄγαν, Ne quid nimis, Never go to extremes.]. They overdo everything; they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else. And they think they know everything, and confidently affirm it, and this is the cause of their excess in everything."

"A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself; in language ... not in a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions."

"A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end."

"διὸ καὶ φιλοσοφώτερον καὶ σπουδαιότερον ποίησις ἱστορίας ἐστίν: ἡ μὲν γὰρ ποίησις μᾶλλον τὰ καθόλου, ἡ δ᾽ ἱστορία τὰ καθ᾽ ἕκαστον λέγει."

"διὸ εὐφυοῦς ἡ ποιητική ἐστιν ἢ μανικοῦ"

"But the greatest thing by far is to have a command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances."

"Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully."

"For the purposes of poetry a convincing impossibility is preferable to an unconvincing possibility."

"The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

"I have gained this by philosophy ... I do without being ordered what some are constrained to do by their fear of the law."

"Liars ... when they speak the truth they are not believed."

"Hope is the dream of a waking man."

"A friend is one soul abiding in two bodies."

"Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas."

"The single harmony produced by all the heavenly bodies singing and dancing together springs from one source and ends by achieving one purpose, and has rightly bestowed the name not of "disordered" but of "ordered universe" upon the whole."

"Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Except are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love."

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

"Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for goals."

"Happiness depends upon ourselves"

"What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good."

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."

"The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance."

"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts not breaths; // In feelings, not in figures on a dial. // We should count time by heart throbs. He most lives // Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best."

"The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal. (Whilst a paraphrase this is based on Aristotle's writings as Aristotle stated "For instance, it is thought that justice is equality, and so it is, though not for everybody but only for those who are equals; and it is thought that inequality is just, for so indeed it is, though not for everybody, but for those who are unequal" in https://www.loebclassics.com/view/aristotle-politics/1932/pb_LCL264.211.xml Politics, III. V. 8."

"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing."

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

"Those who can, do, those who cannot, teach."

"Humour is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humour. For a subject which would not bear raillery is suspicious; and a jest which would not bear a serious examination is certainly false wit."

"Tolerance and apathy are the last virtues of a dying society."

"I was very fortunate. I was curious and handicapped as a young person. And so I read everything I could get my hands on and I have a good memory. And I have a lot of energy. It's a blessing. So I continued to learn. I'm hungry for knowledge still. Not every young person is blessed or visited with that combination. So he or she desperately needs to go to a university and be introduced to some of the great ideas of humankind. One needs to worry over the question of "Why am I here, what am I doing here of all things in this place, this life?" One needs to know Aristotle and Plato. One needs it desperately. One must have Leopold and Pascal. Must! I mean desperately, if one is to be at ease anywhere. One should have read the African folk tale to see what the West African calls deep thinking. One must worry over ideas that if I come forward how far do we have to go before we meet? And when we meet will I go through you and you go through me and continue until we meet someone else? This is an African concept. Do we stay once we meet or do I actually go right through you and pass through you and continue on that road. Is that what life is? All this knowledge is available at universities and one is more likely to run into a great teacher at a university than one is at a pool hall. It just follows."

"Once upon a time, Aristotle taught Alexander that he should restrain himself from frequently approaching his wife, who was very beautiful, lest he should impede his spirit from seeking the general good. Alexander acquiesed to him. The queen, when she perceived this and was upset, began to draw Aristotle to love her. Many times she crossed paths with him alone, with bare feet and disheveled hair, so that she might entice him. At last, being enticed, he began to solicit her carnally. She says, "This I will certainly not do, unless I see a sign of love, lest you be testing me. Therefore, come to my chamber crawling on hand and foot, in order to carry me like a horse. Then I'll know that you aren't deluding me." When he had consented to that condition, she secretly told the matter to Alexander, who lying in wait apprehended him carrying the queen. When Alexander wished to kill Aristotle, in order to excuse himself, Aristotle says, If thus it happened to me, an old man most wise, that I was deceived by a woman, you can see that I taught you well, that it could happen to you, a young man." Hearing that, the king spared him, and made progress in Aristotle's teachings."

"Aristotle, notwithstanding that for political reasons of his own he maintained a prudent silence as to certain esoteric matters, expressed very clearly his opinion on the subject. It was his belief that human souls are emanations of God, that are finally re-absorbed into Divinity. (p. 13)"

"Robert [Grosseteste] became much interested in science and scientific method... He was conscious of the dual approach by means of induction and deduction (resolution and composition); i.e., from the empirical knowledge one proceeds to probable general principles, and from these as premises one them derives conclusions which constitute verifications or falsifications of the principles. This approach to science was not that far removed from Aristotle..."

"Some 2,000 years ago Aristotle declared that eels were generated spontaneously from mud."

"[Aristotle] totally misrepresents Plato's doctrine of "Ideas." ... It is also pertinent to inquire, what is the difference between the "formal cause" of Aristotle and the archetypal ideas of Plato? ... Yet Aristotle is forever congratulating himself that he alone has properly treated the "formal" and the "final cause"!"

"Aristotle was the first genuine scientist in history. . . . Every scientist is in his debt."

"According to Aristotle, scientific investigation and explanation was a twofold process, the first inductive and the second deductive. The investigator must begin with what was prior in the order of knowing, that is, with the facts observed through the senses, and he must ascend through induction to generalizations or universal forms or causes which were most remote from sensory experience, yet causing that experience and therefore prior in the order of nature. [Footnote:] The idea that the order of demonstration was the order of nature came from Plato. Aristotle said that the order of discovery was the reverse of the order of demonstration."

"The model of scientific knowledge, in which effects could be shown to follow necessarily from their causes as conclusions from premises, Aristotle held to be mathematics, and where mathematics could be used in the natural sciences their conclusions were also exact and necessary. ... Of the inductive process by which the investigator passed from sensory experience of particular facts or connexions to a grasp of the prior demonstrative principles that explained them, Aristotle gave a clear psychological account. The final stage in the process was the sudden act by which the intuitive reason or νοῦς, after a number of experiences of facts, grasped the universal or theory explaining them, or penetrated to knowledge of the substance causing and connecting them."

"Is the ordinary person incompetent? No judgment is more decisive for one's political philosophy. It was perhaps the single most important difference in judgment between Plato and Aristotle."

"It is difficult to be enthusiastic about Aristotle, because it was difficult for him to be enthusiastic about anything... He realized too completely the Delphic command to avoid excess: he is so anxious to pare away extremes that at last nothing is left. He is so fearful of disorder that he forgets to be fearful of slavery; he.is so timid of uncertain change that he prefers a certain changelessness that near resembles death. He lacks that Heraclitean sense of flux which justifies the conservative in believing that all permanent change is gradual, and justifies the radical in believing that no changelessness is permanent. He forgets that Plato's communism was meant only for the elite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he comes deviously to a Platonic result when he says that though property should be private, its use should be as far as possible common. He does not see (and perhaps he could not be expected in his early day to see) that individual control of the means of production was stimulating and salutary only when these means were so simple as to be purchasable by any man; and that their increasing complexity and cost lead to a dangerous centralization of ownership and power, and to an artificial and finally disruptive inequality."

"From quotations I had seen I had a high notion of Aristotle's merits, but I had not the most remote notion what a wonderful man he was. Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle."

"It is pretty definitely settled, among men competent to form a judgment, that Aristotle was the best educated man that ever walked on the surface of this earth. He is still, as he was in Dante's time, the "master of those that know." It is, therefore, not without reason that we look to him, not only as the best exponent of ancient education, but as one of the worthiest guides and examples in education generally. That we may not lose the advantage of his example, it will be well, before we consider his educational theories, to cast a glance at his life, the process of his development, and his work."

"The old Greek philosophy, which in Europe in the later middle ages was synonymous with the works of Aristotle, considered motion as a thing for which a cause must be found: a velocity required a force to produce and to maintain it. The great discovery of Galileo was that not velocity, but acceleration requires a force. This is the law of inertia of which the real content is: the natural phenomena are described by differential equations of the second order."

"I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color-line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of the evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?"

"John Philoponus (c. 490-570) of Alexandria... refuted Aristotle's theory that the velocities of falling bodies in a given medium are proportional to their weight, making the observation that "if one lets fall simultaneously from the same height two bodies differing greatly in weight, one will find that the ratio of the times of their motion does not correspond to the ratios of their weights, but the difference in time is a very small one." ...He also criticized Aristotle's antiperistasis theory of projectile motion, which states that the air displaced by the object flows back to push it from behind. Instead Philoponus concluded that "some incorporeal kinetic power is imparted by the thrower to the object thrown" and that "if an arrow or a stone is projected by force in a void, the same will happen much more easily, nothing being necessary except the thrower." This is the famous "impetus theory," which was revived in medieval Islam and again in fourteenth century Europe, giving rise to the beginning of modern dynamics."

"We have in our age new accidents and observations, and such, that I question not in the least, but if Aristotle were now alive, they would make him change his opinion; which may be easily collected from the very manner of his discoursing: For when he writeth that he e­steemeth the Heavens inalterable, &c. because no new thing was seen to be begot therein, or any old to be dissolved, he seems im­plicitely to hint unto us, that when he should see any such accident, he would hold the contrary; and confront, as indeed it is meet, sensible experiments to natural reason: for had he not made any reckoning of the senses, he would not then from the not seeing of any sensible mutation, have argued immutability."

"I do believe for certain, that he [Aristotle] first procured, by the help of the senses, such experiments and observations as he could, to assure him as much as was possible of the conclusion, and that he afterwards sought out the means how to demonstrate it; for this is the usual course in demonstrative sciences. And the reason thereof is, because when the conclusion is true, by the help of the resolutive method, one may hit upon some proposition before demonstrated, or come to some principle known per se; but if the conclusion be false, a man may proceed in infinitum, and never meet with any truth already known."

"The group of philosophical ideas that concerns us has been called essentialism by Popper, who has traced the impact of Plato's metaphysics on political thinking down to modern times. Even before Plato, Greek philosophy began to experience difficulties in dealing with change. If things grew, or passed away, they seem somehow unreal, suggesting that they belonged only to a world of appearances. Heraclitus, in adopting the notion that material things are illusory, maintained that all that really exists is "fire"—that is, process. ...To Plato, true reality exists in the essence, Idea, or eidos. ...In the hands of Aristotle, essentialist metaphysics became somewhat altered. ...[H]e held that [essences] did not exist apart from things. His works embraced the concepts of teleology, empiricism, and natural science... to understand a thing was to know its essence, or to define it. ...A true system of knowledge thus became essentially a classification scheme... Plato and Aristotle... both embraced the notion that ideas or classes are more than just abstractions—that is... both advocated forms of "realism." ...Aristotle ...advocated heirarchical classification... classes were differentiated... by properties held in common... An implication, of enormous historical importance, was that it became very difficult to classify things which change, or... grade into one another, or even to conceive or to discuss them. Indeed, the very attempt to reason in terms of essences almost forces one to ignore everything dynamic or transitory. One could hardly design a philosophy better suited to predispose one toward dogmatic reasoning and static concepts. The Darwinian revolution thus depended upon the collapse of the Western intellectual tradition."