Aristotle Philosophical Quotations

Change in all things is sweet.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

No excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.

Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.

The most perfect political community is one in which the middle class is in control, and outnumbers both of the other classes.

Thou wilt find rest from vain fancies if thou doest every act in life as though it were thy last.

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

Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.

Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.

The greatest virtues are those which are most useful to other persons.

Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.

The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.

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

Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.

It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.

It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.

Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

A constitution is the arrangement of magistracies in a state.

We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.

It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.

The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.

Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.

Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.

Bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

I have gained this from philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law.

Temperance is a mean with regard to pleasures.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

No one would choose a friendless existence on condition of having all the other things in the world.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Courage is a mean with regard to fear and confidence.

For this reason poetry is something more philosophical and more worthy of serious attention than history.

A man who examines each subject from a philosophical standpoint cannot neglect them: he has to omit nothing, and state the truth about each topic.

for we are inquiring not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use

Happiness is the highest good

The secret to humor is surprise.

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize.... And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant ...; therefore since they philosophized in order to escape from ignorance, evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end.

Well begun is half done.

Bad men are full of repentance.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Nature does nothing in vain.

Happiness lies in virtuous activity, and perfect happiness lies in the best activity, which is contemplative

Man is by nature a political animal.