Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidice, on the northern periphery of Classical Greece. His father, Nicomachus, died when Aristotle was a child, whereafter Proxenus of Atarneus became his guardian. At eighteen, he joined Plato's Academy in Athens and remained there until the age of thirty-seven. His writings cover many subjects – including physics, biology, zoology, metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, poetry, theater, music, rhetoric, linguistics, politics and government – and constitute the first comprehensive system...
NationalityGreek
ProfessionPhilosopher
If thinking is like perceiving, it must be either a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought, or a process different from but analogous to that. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassable, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, must be potentially identical in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.
No state will be well administered unless the middle class holds sway.
The high-minded man is fond of conferring benefits, but it shames him to receive them.
The greatest injustices proceed from those who pursue excess, not by those who are driven by necessity.
Madness is badness of spirit, when one seeks profit from all sources.
The first principle of all action is leisure.
The misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god...
Soul and body, I suggest react sympathetically upon each other. A change in the state of the soul produces a change in the shape of the body and conversely, a change in the shape of the body produces a change in the state of the soul.
Man first begins to philosophize when the necessities of life are supplied.
Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.
For good is simple, evil manifold.
Wicked men obey out of fear. good men, out of love
A man's happiness consists in the free exercise of his highest faculties.