"Sophocles said he drew men as they ought to be, and Euripides as they were."
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Aristotle quotes (page 36 of 64)
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"Beauty depends on size as well as symmetry. No very small animal can be beautiful, for looking at it takes so small a portion of time that the impression of it will be confused. Nor can any very large one, for a whole view of it cannot be had at once, and so there will be no unity and completeness."
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"For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements."
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"No one who desires to become good will become good unless he does good things."
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"A man is the origin of his action."
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"The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement."
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"Any change of government which has to be introduced should be one which men, starting from their existing constitutions, will be both willing and able to adopt, since there is quite as much trouble in the reformation of an old constitution as in the establishment of a new one, just as to unlearn is as hard as to learn."
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"Where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power to not act."
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"The wise man knows of all things, as far as possible, although he has no knowledge of each of them in detail"
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"A human being is a naturally political [animal]."
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"There are, then, these three means of effecting persuasion. The man who is to be in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions--that is, to name them and describe them, to know their causes and the way in which they are excited."
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"Thus it is thought that justice is equality; and so it is, but not for all persons, only for those that are equal. Inequality also is thought to be just; and so it is, but not for all, only for the unequal. We make bad mistakes if we neglect this for whom when we are deciding what is just. The reason is that we are making judgements about ourselves, and people are generally bad judges where their own interests are involved."
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"The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success."
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"You'll understand what life is if you think about the act of dying. When I die, how will I be different from the way I am right now? In the first moments after death, my body will be scarcely different in physical terms than it was in the last seconds of life, but I will no longer move, no longer sense, nor speak, nor feel, nor care. It's these things that are life. At that moment, the psyche takes flight in the last breath."
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"Anything that we have to learn to do we learn by the actual doing of it; People become builders by building and instrumentalists by playing instruments. Similarily, we become just by performing just acts, temperate by performing temperate ones, brave by performing brave ones."
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"Leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure."
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"There is nothing grand or noble in having the use of a slave, in so far as he is a slave; or in issuing commands about necessary things. But it is an error to suppose that every sort of rule is despotic like that of a master over slaves, for there is as great a difference between the rule over freemen and the rule over slaves as there is between slavery by nature and freedom by nature . ."
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"Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law, and without justice."
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"The body is most fully developed from thirty to thirty-five years of age, the mind at about forty-nine."
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"Adoration is made out of a solitary soul occupying two bodies."
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