Aristotle quotes

384–322 BCE · Stagira, Greece

• On another occasion the question was put to him, what hope is? and his answer was, “The dream of a waking man.”

• The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.

• All mankind have an instinctive desire of knowledge.

• But the Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working, which, again, is the case of other things, as the arts for instance; for what we have to make when we have learned how, these we learn how to make by making: men come to be builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave.

• And we must add, in a complete life; for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

• Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal.