Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
A man who has been well trained will not in any case look for more accuracy than the nature of the matter allows; for to expect exact demonstration from a rhetorician is as absurd as to accept from a mathematician a statement only probable.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
A beginning is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Beauty is the gift from God.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
To learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.
ARISTOTLE
The Nicomachean Ethics
It would then be most admirably adapted to the purposes of justice, if laws properly enacted were, as far as circumstances admitted, of themselves to mark out all cases, and to abandon as few as possible to the discretion of the judge.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
The instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood, one difference between him and other animals being that he is the most imitative of creatures; and through imitation he learns his earliest lessons.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Now ends clearly differ from one another. For, firstly, in some cases the end is an act, while in others it is a material result beyond and besides that act. And, where the action involves any such end beyond itself, this end is of necessity better than is the act by which it is produced.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Man delights in society far more than do bees or herds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Now there are two ways in which fire outside the body can, as we see, come to an end, namely, exhaustion and extinction. By exhaustion we mean that termination which is produced by the fire itself; by extinction, that which is produced by the contraries of fire.
ARISTOTLE
On Youth & Old Age, Life & Death
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Happiness consists in the consciousness of a life in which the highest Virtue is actively manifested.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Nothing can be truly just which is inconsistent with humanity.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
Every wicked man is in ignorance as to what he ought to do, and from what to abstain, and it is because of error such as this that men become unjust and, in a word, wicked.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Abstract accuracy is no more to be expected in all philosophic treatises than in all products of art, and noble and just acts with which the art political is concerned admit of such great variation and of so many differences that they have been held to depend upon conventional rather than upon real distinctions.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics