Aristotle

Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, teacher, and scientist, one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western thought. He was the oracle of the scholastic philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages. He is the author of a great number of writings which covered a vast field of speculation, including logic, ethics, metaphysics, politics, natural sciences, and physics, of which the progress of modern science goes to establish the value. He is often referred to as the incarnation of the philosophic spirit. He was a student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great.

Aristotle was a native of Stagira, in Thrace, and hence named the Stagirite. While yet a youth, he was deprived of his parents. In his 17th year, he came to Athens and remained in Plato's society there for 20 years. After the death of Plato, his teacher, at the request of Philip, king of Macedon, who held him in high honour, he became the preceptor of Alexander the Great, the prince of Macedon, then only 13 years old. On Alexander's expedition into Asia, returned to Athens and began to teach in the Lyceum, a school which he had founded outside Athens, where it was his habit to walk up and down as he taught, from which circumstance his school got the name of Peripatetic. After 13 years he left the city and went to Chalcis, in Euboea, where he died.

His famous works are Rhetorics, Politics, Natural History and Poetics.

Wisdom & Quotes

• Beauty is the gift of god.

- quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• Hope is a waking dream.

- quoted in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

• We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.

-Nicomachean Ethics

• All virtue is summed up in dealing justly.

- Nicomachean Ethics

• One swallow does not make a spring.

- Nicomachean Ethics

• Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil - and if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.

- Nicomachean Ethics

• The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication; for youth is sweet and they are growing.

- Nicomachean Ethics

• Law means good order.

-Politics

• Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

- Politics

• He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself , must be either a beast or a god.

- Politics

• Man is by nature a political animal.

- Politics

• That which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it.

- Politics

• Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, effecting through pity and fear the proper purgation (katharsis) of these emotions.

- Poetics

• The greatest thing in style is to have a command of metaphor.

-Poetics

• Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.

- Rhetoric

• A good style must have an air of novelty, at the same time concealing its art.

- Rhetoric

• A good style must, first of all, be clear. It must ... be appropriate.

- Rhetoric

• Philosophy is the science of truth.
• Nature does not do anything in vain.
• Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact.

- Analytica Posteriora

• Music directly represents the passion of the soul. If one listens to the wrong kind of music, he will become the wrong kind of person.
• The wise man must not be ordered but must order, and he must not obey another, but the less wise must obey him.
• The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts.
• There are three lines of life which stand out prominently to view: the life of pleasure, the political life, and the life of reflection.
• It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.
• While both are dear, Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.
• Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes. To entrust to chance what is greatest and most noble would be a very defective arrangement.
• For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.
• 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.
• When people are friends, they have no need of justice, but when they are just, they need friendship in addition.
• And happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.
• Evils draw men together.

- Rhetoric

• Wit is cultured insolence.

- Rhetoric

• A whole is that which has beginning, middle, and end.

- Poetics

• Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.

- Poetics

• Poetry demands a man with a special gift for it, or else one with a touch of madness in him.

- Poetics

• The roots of education ... are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

- quoted by Diogenes Laërtius in "The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers"

Epicurus