Best Aristotle Quotes

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.

The law is reason, free from passion.

Happiness depends upon ourselves.

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes.

The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well.

For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

He who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander.

Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.

He who cannot be a good follower cannot be a good leader.

Fortune favours the bold.

A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

He who is to be a good ruler must have first been ruled.

The energy of the mind is the essence of life.

The truly good and wise man will bear all kinds of fortune in a seemly way, and will always act in the noblest manner that the circumstances allow.

Man is a goal-seeking animal. His life only has meaning if he is reaching out and striving for his goals.

The ultimate value of life depends upon awareness and the power of contemplation rather than upon mere survival.

The gods too are fond of a joke.

What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good.