Thinker

Aristotle quotes

17 passages in English · 384–322 BCE · Peripatetic.

Overview

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was a Greek philosopher born in Stagira in Macedonia, the son of a court physician. At about seventeen he entered Plato’s Academy in Athens and remained associated with it until Plato’s death in 347. He then researched in Assos and on Lesbos, where his biological interests deepened, and later tutored Alexander of Macedon. Returning to Athens around 335, he founded the Lyceum and organized collaborative inquiry across disciplines. Roughly thirty treatises survive from a once larger corpus, written largely as lecture notes rather than literary dialogues. Their range—logic, metaphysics, physics, biology, psychology, ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics—made him antiquity’s most encyclopedic philosopher. He fled Athens in 323 and died the next year in Chalcis. Alongside Plato he anchors Classical Greek philosophy and shaped centuries of commentary in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and modern vernaculars.

Main ideas

Aristotle pursued demonstrative science grounded in observation, definition, and causal explanation. His Organon developed syllogistic logic and standards of proof that structured Western reasoning for two millennia. Metaphysics analyzes substance as form-in-matter, distinguishes potentiality from actuality, and posits an unmoved mover as pure actuality. Ethics aims at eudaimonia through virtues that are means relative to us, acquired by habituation and guided by phronesis. Politics treats humans as political animals and compares constitutions empirically. Natural philosophy emphasizes teleology in living natures and four causes—material, formal, efficient, and final. Psychology in De Anima treats soul as the form of a living body. Across domains he begins from endoxa and phenomena, refining them by dialectic and analysis rather than discarding common experience. The result is a comprehensive map of knowledge oriented to understanding natures and living well within the polis.

Major works

  • Nicomachean Ethics
  • Politics
  • Metaphysics
  • Organon

Legacy

Aristotle’s logic and natural philosophy dominated medieval Christian and Islamic curricula; Averroes and Aquinas made him “the Philosopher.” Early modern science overturned his physics yet retained his vocabulary of substance, cause, and classification. Virtue ethics, philosophy of biology, and practical reason debates continually return to his texts, and the Lyceum remains a lasting symbol of organized research across the sciences and humanities.

Themes in this archive

Friendship (4) · Aristotle on friendship · Habit (3) · Aristotle on habit · Meaning (3) · Aristotle on meaning · Happiness (2) · Aristotle on happiness · Philosophy (1) · Community (1)

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. The human good is activity of soul in accordance with virtue.
  3. Virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature; we are fitted by nature to receive them, and are brought to completion by habit.
  4. Virtue is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us.
  5. Man is by nature a political animal.
  6. A friend is another self.
  7. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts.
  8. So too, by doing just acts we become just, by doing temperate acts temperate, and by doing brave acts brave.
  9. For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day.
  10. It is perhaps also strange to make the happy person a solitary.
  11. It is possible to fail in many ways…but to succeed in only one.
  12. All human beings by nature desire to know.
  13. Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good.
  14. After this we should speak of friendship; for it is a kind of virtue, or involves virtue.
  15. States of character arise out of like activities.
  16. Virtue lies in a mean.
  17. Perfect friendship is the friendship of those who are good and alike in virtue.