Aristotle Quotes

1) A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.
2) A friend to all is a friend to none.
3) A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
4) 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.
5) A tragedy is a representation of an action that is whole and complete and of a certain magnitude. A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end.
6) A true friend is one soul in two bodies.
7) All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
8) All men by nature desire knowledge.
9) All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.
10) All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.
11) At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
12) Bad men are full of repentance.
13) Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.
14) Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
15) Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit.
16) Change in all things is sweet.
17) Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.
18) Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.
19) Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.
20) 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.
21) Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
22) 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.
23) Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
24) Education is an ornament in prosperity and a refuge in adversity.
25) Education is the best provision for old age.
26) Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.
27) 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.
28) Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.
29) For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.
30) For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
31) For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.
32) Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.
33) Friendship is essentially a partnership.
34) Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
35) Happiness depends upon ourselves.
36) He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.
37) Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.
38) Man is by nature a political animal.
39) Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.
40) Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.
41) Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
42) Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
43) 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.
44) Most people would rather give than get affection.
45) Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
46) My best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
47) Nature does nothing in vain.
48) No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.
49) No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness.
50) No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.
51) No one loves the man whom he fears.
52) Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.
53) Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
54) Plato is dear to me, but dearer still is truth.
55) Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
56) Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
57) Quality is not an act, it is a habit.
58) Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
59) Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.
60) The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

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