Philosopher · Greek · 142 quotes
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.
Aristotle
Philosopher · Greek
The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.
Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.
A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal.
The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.
Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.
All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
The soul never thinks without a picture.
Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
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.
Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
Of all the varieties of virtues, liberalism is the most beloved.
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
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.
Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.
We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the utmost.
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.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
Friendship is essentially a partnership.
Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
Most people would rather give than get affection.
The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
All men by nature desire knowledge.
Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
In making a speech one must study three points: first, the means of producing persuasion; second, the language; third the proper arrangement of the various parts of the speech.
All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
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.
