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
Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of nature of universals, whereas those of history are of singulars
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.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development
The best friend is the man who in wishing me well wishes it for my sake.
It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.
Every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite.
Tragedy is thus a representation of an action that is worth serious attention, complete in itself and of some amplitude... by means of pity and fear bringing about the purgation of such emotions.
A true friend is one soul in two bodies.
A tragedy is the imitation of an action that is serious, and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself . . . with incidents arousing pity and terror, with which to accomplish its purgation of these emotions.
Dignity consists not in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.
We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us
The search for truth is in one way hard and in another way easy, for it is evident that no one can master it fully or miss it wholly. But each adds a little to our knowledge of nature, and from all the facts assembled there arises a certain grandeur.
This communicating of a man's self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in half.