ARISTOTLE QUOTES VIII

Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)


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Money ... is founded merely on convention; its currency and value depending on the mutable wills of men.

ARISTOTLE
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Politics


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Tags: money


Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: poetry, madness


Discontents arise not merely from the inequality of possessions, but from the equality of honors. The multitude complain that property is unjustly, because unequally, distributed; men of superior merit or superior pretentions complain that honors are unjustly, if equally, distributed.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

Tags: equality


Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics


What, then, is in each case the chief good? Surely it will be that to which all else that is done is but a means. And this in medicine will be health, and in tactics victory, and in architecture a house, and so forth in other cases.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics


All learning is derived from things previously known.

ARISTOTLE

The Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: learning


Let us define rhetoric to be: "A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject;" for this is the business of no one of the other arts, each of which is fit enough to inform or persuade respecting its own subject; medicine, for instance, on what conduces to health or sickness; and geometry, on the subject of relations incidental to magnitudes; and arithmetic, on the subject of numbers; and in the same way the remaining arts and sciences. But rhetoric, as I may say, seems able to consider the means of persuasion on any given subject whatsoever. And hence I declare it to have for its province, as an art, no particular limited class of subjects.

ARISTOTLE

Rhetoric


Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: piety


The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.

ARISTOTLE

Poetics

Tags: writing


It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speach and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.

ARISTOTLE

Rhetoric


We are masters of our actions from the beginning up to the very end. But, in the case of our habits, we are only masters of their commencement--each particular little increase being as imperceptible as in the case of bodily infirmities. But yet our habits are voluntary, in that it was once in our power to adopt or not to adopt such or such a course of conduct.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: habit


The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: pleasure


In the human constitution, therefore, mind governs matter absolutely and despotically; but reason governs appetite with a far more limited sway.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

Tags: mind


Kings ought to differ from their subjects, not in kind, but in perfection.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

Tags: kings


It is not to avoid cold or hunger that tyrants cover themselves with blood; and states decree the most illustrious rewards, not to him who catches a thief, but to him who kills an usurper.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

Tags: tyranny


But the merchant, if faithful to his principles, always employs his money reluctantly for any other purpose than that of augmenting itself.

ARISTOTLE

Politics

Tags: money


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

ARISTOTLE

letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities


Wickedness is nourished by lust.

ARISTOTLE

attributed, Day's Collacon

Tags: lust


Without virtue it is difficult to bear gracefully the honors of fortune.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: virtue


To those who cite the disreputable sorts of pleasure one may fairly reply that these are not really pleasant. For we ought not, because they are pleasant to the wrongly disposed, to think they are generally pleasant, or to any but these; just as things that are wholesome or sweet or bitter to the sick, are not so to all, and as things are not really white that seem so to those suffering from opthalmia.

ARISTOTLE

Nicomachean Ethics

Tags: pleasure