Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical period in Ancient Greece. He was the founder of the Lyceum and the Peripatetic school of philosophy and Aristotelian tradition. Along with his teacher Plato, he has been called the “Father of Western Philosophy”. This Aristotle quotes on education, democracy, soul, citizenship will motivate you in life.
Best Aristotle Quotes
- “Be a free thinker and don’t accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what you believe in.” ~ Aristotle
- “Masculine republics give way to feminine democracies, and feminine democracies give way to tyranny.” ~ Aristotle
- “Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives – choice, not chance, determines your destiny.” ~ Aristotle
- “The most important relationship we can all have is the one you have with yourself, the most important journey you can take is one of self-discovery. To know yourself, you must spend time with yourself, you must not be afraid to be alone. Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ~ Aristotle
- “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” ~ Aristotle, Aristotle quotes on education
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“The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.” ~ Aristotle
- “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.” ~ Aristotle
- “Criticism is something we can avoid easily
by saying nothing, doing nothing,
and being nothing.” ~ Aristotle - “Only an armed people can be truly free. Only unarmed people can ever be enslaved.” ~ Aristotle
- “Love is composed of single soul inhabiting two bodies.” ~ Aristotle, Aristotle quotes on love
- “Happiness is a quality of the soul…not a function of one’s material circumstances.” ~ Aristotle
- “Character is revealed through action.” ~ Aristotle
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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” ~ Aristotle
- “Our problem is not that we aim too high and miss, but that we aim too low and hit.” ~ Aristotle
- “What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.” ~ Aristotle
- “It is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.” ~ Aristotle
- “Think as the wise men think, but talk like the simple people do.” ~ Aristotle
- “Find the good. Seek Unity. Ignore the divisions among us.” ~ Aristotle
- “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.” ~ Aristotle
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“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.” ~ Aristotle
- “Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.” ~ Aristotle
- “Teenagers these days are out of control. They eat like pigs, they are disrespectful of adults, they interrupt and contradict their parents, and they terrorize their teachers.” ~ Aristotle
- “The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think.” ~ Aristotle
- “The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.” ~ Aristotle
- “The greatest of all pleasures is the pleasure of learning.” ~ Aristotle
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“The worst thing about slavery is that the slaves eventually get to like it.” ~ Aristotle
- “The tyrant, who in order to hold his power, suppresses every superiority, does away with good men, forbids education and light, controls every movement of the citizens and, keeping them under a perpetual servitude, wants them to grow accustomed to baseness and cowardice, has his spies everywhere to listen to what is said in the meetings, and spreads dissension and calumny among the citizens and impoverishes them, is obliged to make war in order to keep his subjects occupied and impose on them the permanent need of a chief.” ~ Aristotle
- “The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” ~ Aristotle
- “It is not possible to rule well without having been ruled.” ~ Aristotle, Aristotle quotes on politics
- “The fool tells me his reason; the wise man persuades me with my own.” ~ Aristotle
- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ~ Aristotle
- “Tyrants preserve themselves by sowing fear and mistrust among the citizens by means of spies, by distracting them with foreign wars, by eliminating men of spirit who might lead a revolution, by humbling the people, and making them incapable of decisive action.” ~ Aristotle
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“The proof that you know something is that you are able to teach it” ~ Aristotle
- “Before you heal the body you must first heal the mind” ~ Aristotle
- “Health is a matter of choice, not a mystery of chance” ~ Aristotle
- “You are what you repeatedly do” ~ Aristotle
- “I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.” ~ Aristotle
- “We are what we repeatedly do… excellence, therefore, isn’t just an act, but a habit and life isn’t just a series of events, but an ongoing process of self-definition.” ~ Aristotle
- “The aim of the wise is not to secure pleasure, but to avoid pain.” ~ Aristotle
- “He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.” ~ Aristotle
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“First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end.” ~ Aristotle
- “Virtue means doing the right thing, in relation to the right person, at the right time, to the right extent, in the right manner, and for the right purpose. Thus, to give money away is quite a simple task, but for the act to be virtuous, the donor must give to the right person, for the right purpose, in the right amount, in the right manner, and at the right time.” ~ Aristotle
- “A goal gets us motivated, while a good habit keeps us stay motivated.” ~ Aristotle
- “He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.” ~ Aristotle
- “Democracy arose from men’s thinking that if they are equal in any respect they are equal absolutely.” ~ Aristotle, Aristotle quotes on democracy
- “The greatest crimes are caused by surfeit, not by want.” ~ Aristotle
- “Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.” ~ Aristotle
- “When there is no middle class, and the poor greatly exceed in number, troubles arise, and the state soon comes to an end.” ~ Aristotle
- “We are the sum of our actions, and therefore our habits make all the difference.” ~ Aristotle
- “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learned from others, and it is also a sign of genius since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity of the dissimilar.” ~ Aristotle
- “A friend of everyone is a friend of no one.” ~ Aristotle
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“What you have to learn to do, you learn by doing.” ~ Aristotle
- “All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind.” ~ Aristotle
- “The intelligence consists not only in the knowledge but also in the skill to apply the knowledge into practice.” ~ Aristotle
- “The difference between a learned man and an ignorant one is the same as that between a living man and a corpse.” ~ Aristotle
- “You should never think without an image.” ~ Aristotle
- “Even some people try deceived me many times … I will not fail to believe that somewhere, someone deserves my trust.” ~ Aristotle
- “The high-minded man does not bear grudges, for it is not the mark of a great soul to remember injuries, but to forget them.” ~ Aristotle
