Aristotle
Greek philosopher and polymath, student of Plato, tutor of Alexander the Great, founder of the Lyceum (335 BCE), and author of one of the most encyclopedic surviving bodies of work in the history of human thought — covering logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, biology, physics, psychology, rhetoric, poetics, and meteorology. Born 384 BCE in Stagira on the Chalcidic peninsula, he entered Plato's Academy in Athens at seventeen and remained for twenty years before moving on to tutor Alexander, then returning to Athens to found his own school. His ethical masterwork Nicomachean Ethics established eudaimonia ('flourishing,' often translated as 'happiness') as the highest human good — to be pursued through the cultivation of virtue understood as a 'mean' between extremes, lived in a polity, and culminating in the contemplative life. He died in 322 BCE on Euboea after fleeing Athens during the anti-Macedonian backlash that followed Alexander's death.
quotes in library
Quotes by Aristotle
105 quotes“Without this desire, there is no philosophy.”
“With this desire, there is the beginning of all human achievement.”
“Man is by nature a political animal.”
“He achieves his nature only in community with others.”
“To live alone is to be either a beast or a god.”
“And no human being is either.”
“Therefore, every human life is, by nature, a life among others.”
“And the polis — the political community — is the natural setting for the human good.”
“This is why politics matters.”
“Not as power play. As the field of human flourishing.”
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
“Tragedy is the imitation of an action serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude.”
“Through pity and fear, tragedy effects a catharsis of these emotions.”
“This is the function of tragic art.”
“Poetry is more philosophical than history.”
“For poetry deals with the universal. History deals with the particular.”
“And the universal is closer to truth than the particular.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“The well-formed whole has a quality the parts alone do not.”
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