"Nature operates in the shortest way possible."
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Quote collection
Aristotle quotes (page 19 of 64)
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"When the storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence."
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"Happiness does not consist in amusement. In fact, it would be strange if our end were amusement, and if we were to labor and suffer hardships all our life long merely to amuse ourselves.... The happy life is regarded as a life in conformity with virtue. It is a life which involves effort and is not spent in amusement."
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"It is no part of a physician's business to use either persuasion or compulsion upon the patients."
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"Virtue is the golden mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency."
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"In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead."
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"Freedom is obedience to self-formulated rules."
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"The greatest threat to the state is not faction but distraction"
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"There also appears to be another element in the soul, which, though irrational, yet in a manner participates in rational principle."
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"[this element], the seat of the appetites and of desire in general, does in a sense participate in principle, as being amenable and obedient to it"
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"Imagination is a sort of faint perception."
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"The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things."
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"The soul is characterized by these capacities; self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and movement."
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"The word is a sign or symbol of the impressions or affections of the soul."
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"In a word, acts of any kind produce habits or characters of the same kind. Hence we ought to make sure that our acts are of a certain kind; for the resulting character varies as they vary. It makes no small difference, therefore, whether a man be trained in his youth up in this way or that, but a great difference, or rather all the difference."
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"[Meanness] is more ingrained in man's nature than Prodigality; the mass of mankind are avaricious rather than open-handed."
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"Evil draws men together."
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"Most men appear to think that the art of despotic government is statesmanship, and what men affirm to be unjust and inexpedient in their own case they are not ashamed of practicing towards others; they demand just rule for themselves, but where other men are concerned they care nothing about it. Such behavior is irrational; unless the one party is, and the other is not, born to serve, in which case men have a right to command, not indeed all their fellows, but only those who are intended to be subjects; just as we ought not to hunt mankind, whether for food or sacrifice . ."
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"What the statesman is most anxious to produce is a certain moral character in his fellow citizens, namely a disposition to virtue and the performance of virtuous actions."
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"Democracy arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects; because men are equally free, they claim to be absolutely equal."
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