Show more

Aristotle Quotes: 43

  • Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.

  • Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

  • Hope is a waking dream.

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

    Metaphysics
  • What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.

  • Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art.

  • Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

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

  • 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.

  • The secret to humor is surprise.

  • Happiness depends upon ourselves.

  • Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.

  • Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.

  • Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

  • Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.

  • Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

  • To perceive is to suffer.

  • The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.

  • He who hath many friends hath none.

  • The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.

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

  • One swallow does not make a summer,neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

    The Nicomachean Ethics
  • To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man.

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

  • For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.

    The Nicomachean Ethics
  • It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light.

  • The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

    The Philosophy of Aristotle
  • Wit is educated insolence.

  • I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who overcomes his enemies.

  • All men by nature desire knowledge.

    On Man in the Universe
  • My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.

  • Happiness is a state of activity.

  • Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age.

  • A friend to all is a friend to none.

  • Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.

    Poetics
  • Philosophy can make people sick.

    Nicomachean Ethics
  • Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.

  • Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

  • The gods too are fond of a joke.

  • A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

  • With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.

    The Nicomachean Ethics
  • The pleasures arising from thinking and learning will make us think and learn all the more. 1153a 23

    The Nicomachean Ethics
  • The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul.