Aristotle
384 BC–322 BC
Greek philosopher Aristotle, a pupil of Plato and the tutor of Alexander the Great, authored works on ethics, natural sciences, politics, and poetics that profoundly influenced western thought; empirical observation precedes theory, and the syllogism bases logic, the essential method of rational inquiry in his system, which led him to see and to criticize metaphysical excesses.
Empirical, scientific, or commonsensical methods of an Aristotelian, also Aristotelean, a person, tends to think. Deductive method, especially the theory of the syllogism, defines Aristotelian logic. The formal logic, based on that of Aristotle, deals with the relations between propositions in terms of their form instead of their content.
German religious philosopher Saint Albertus Magnus later sought to apply his methods to current scientific questions. Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the most influential thinker of the medieval period, combined doctrine of Aristotle within a context of Christianity.
Aristotle numbers among the greatest of all time. Almost peerless, he shaped centuries from late antiquity through the Renaissance, and people even today continue to study him with keen, non-antiquarian interest. This prodigious researcher and writer left a great body, perhaps numbering as many as two hundred treatises, from which 31 survive. His extant writings span a wide range of disciplines from mind through aesthetics and rhetoric and into such primary fields as biology; he excelled at detailed plant and animal taxonomy. In all these topics, he provided illumination, met with resistance, sparked debate, and generally stimulated the sustained interest of an abiding readership.
Wide range and its remoteness in time defies easy encapsulation. The long history of interpretation and appropriation of texts and themes, spanning over two millennia within a variety of religious and secular traditions, rendered controversial even basic points of interpretation.
“The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order symmetry and limitations; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”
“He is his own best friend and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.”
“The soul never thinks without a mental picture.”
“The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.”
“For though we love both the truth and our friends, piety requires us to honor the truth first.”
“There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.”
“We give up leisure in order that we may have leisure, just as we go to war in order that we may have peace.”
“Those who know, do. Those that understand, teach.”
“Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.”
“In poverty and other misfortunes of life, true friends are a sure refuge. The young they keep out of mischief; to the old they are a comfort and aid in their weakness, and those in the prime of life they incite to noble deeds.”
“Fear is pain arising from the anticipation of evil.”
“Philosophy can make people sick.”
“All men by nature desire to know.”
“Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.”
“Great men are always of a nature originally melancholy.”
“Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.”
“The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.”
“Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.”
“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”
“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in the consciousness that we deserve them.”
“وقتی زن نداری ، فقط زن نداری اما وقتی زن داری ، فقط زن داری”
“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.”
“He who hath many friends hath none.”
“Even when laws have been written down, they ought not always to remain unaltered.”
“It is their character indeed that makes people who they are. But it is by reason of their actions that they are happy or the reverse.”
“Bad people...are in conflict with themselves; they desire one thing and will another, like the incontinent who choose harmful pleasures instead of what they themselves believe to be good.”
“All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.”
“Without friends, no one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”
“These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.”
“Nature does nothing uselessly.”
“Happiness is a state of activity.”
“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.”
“Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.”
“All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.”
“The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living differ from the dead.”
“Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.”
“Character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion.”
“Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.”
“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.”
“A friend is a second self.”
“Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are therir own”
“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody's power and is not easy.”
“The antidote for fifty enemies is one friend.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”
“What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
“The blood of a goat will shatter a diamond.”
“Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.”
“With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.”
“Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit.”
“Wit is educated insolence.”