Aristotle Self Quotations

When several villages are united in a single complete community, large enough to be nearly or quite self-sufficing, the state comes into existence, originating in the bare needs of life, and continuing in existence for the sake of a good life.

Self-sufficiency is both a good and an absolute good.

The soul is characterized by these capacities; self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and movement.

Happiness, then, is found to be something perfect and self-sufficient, being the end to which our actions are directed.

We become just by the practice of just actions, self-controlled by exercising self-control, and courageous by performing acts of courage.

Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules.

True happiness comes from gaining insight and growing into your best possible self. Otherwise all you're having is immediate gratification pleasure, which is fleeting and doesn't grow you as a person.

Happiness is self-connectedness.

We are what we repeatedly do... excellence, therefore, isn't just an act, but a habit and life isn't just a series of events, but an ongoing process of self-definition.

A life of wealth and many belongings is only a means to happiness. Honor, power, and success cannot be happiness because they depend on the whims of others, and happiness should be self-contained, complete in itself.

The greatest victory is over self.

Both Self-restraint and Unrestraint are a matter of extremes as compared with the character of the mass of mankind; the restrained man shows more and the unrestrained man less steadfastness than most men are capable of.

It must not be supposed that happiness will demand many or great possessions; for self-sufficiency does not depend on excessive abundance, nor does moral conduct, and it is possible to perform noble deeds even without being ruler of land and sea: one can do virtuous acts with quite moderate resources. This may be clearly observed in experience: private citizens do not seem to be less but more given to doing virtuous actions than princes and potentates. It is sufficient then if moderate resources are forthcoming; for a life of virtuous activity will be essentially a happy life.

The proof that the state is a creation of nature and prior to the individual is that the individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing;

Therefore the good man ought to be a lover of self, since he will then both benefit himself by acting nobly and aid his fellows; but the bad man ought not to be a lover of self, since he will follow his base passions, and so injure both himself and his neighbors. With the bad man therefore, what he does is not in accord with what he ought to do, but the good man does what he ought, since intelligence always chooses for itself that which is best, and the good man obeys his intelligence.

For suppose that every tool we had could perform its task, either at our bidding or itself perceiving the need, and if-like the statues made by Dædalus or the tripods of Hephæstus, of which the poet says that "self-moved they enter the assembly of the gods" - shuttles in a loom could fly to and fro and a plectrum play a lyre all self-moved, then master-craftsmen would have no need of servants nor masters of slaves.

Good moral character is not something that we can achieve on our own. We need a culture that supports the conditions under which self-love and friendship flourish.

It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.

A friend is a second self, so that our consciousness of a friend's existence...makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.

Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it; men come to be builders, for instance, by building, and harp players by playing the harp. In the same way, by doing just acts we come to be just; by doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled ; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.

The hardest victory is the victory over self.

The self-indulgent man craves for all pleasant things... and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.

Happiness belongs to the self sufficient.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

A friend is a second self.

The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.