Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
In the human constitution, therefore, mind governs matter absolutely and despotically; but reason governs appetite with a far more limited sway.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which therefore we inquire, present us with alternative possibilities.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Change in all things is sweet.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior. Such is the state of mind which creates revolutions.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
ARISTOTLE
Metaphysics
What, then, is in each case the chief good? Surely it will be that to which all else that is done is but a means. And this in medicine will be health, and in tactics victory, and in architecture a house, and so forth in other cases.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The advantageous situation of the capital and of the territory is necessarily a part of the common stock; and all men who inhabit the same city and country must breathe the same air, and enjoy the same climate.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Whether government be a good or a bad thing, it is fair that men of equal abilities and virtues should equally share in it; that they should receive the advantage of it as their right, or bear the burden of it as their duty.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Without virtue it is difficult to bear gracefully the honors of fortune.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
We are masters of our actions from the beginning up to the very end. But, in the case of our habits, we are only masters of their commencement--each particular little increase being as imperceptible as in the case of bodily infirmities. But yet our habits are voluntary, in that it was once in our power to adopt or not to adopt such or such a course of conduct.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
It is easy to have some knowledge about honey, wine, and hellebore, of cautery and the use of the knife; but how they should be applied for restoring health, to whom and when, is no less a matter than to be a physician.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
But tangible differ from visible and sonorous impressions, in that the latter are perceived by the medium acting in some way upon us, while the former are perceived, not by, but together with, the medium, like a man who is struck through his shield--for it is not the shield which, having been struck, strikes him, but the shield and he are simultaneously struck together.
ARISTOTLE
On the Vital Principle
The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Discontents arise not merely from the inequality of possessions, but from the equality of honors. The multitude complain that property is unjustly, because unequally, distributed; men of superior merit or superior pretentions complain that honors are unjustly, if equally, distributed.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Let us define rhetoric to be: "A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject;" for this is the business of no one of the other arts, each of which is fit enough to inform or persuade respecting its own subject; medicine, for instance, on what conduces to health or sickness; and geometry, on the subject of relations incidental to magnitudes; and arithmetic, on the subject of numbers; and in the same way the remaining arts and sciences. But rhetoric, as I may say, seems able to consider the means of persuasion on any given subject whatsoever. And hence I declare it to have for its province, as an art, no particular limited class of subjects.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speach and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
ARISTOTLE
letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities