What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
Author
Aristotle
145 quotations
About Aristotle
Aristotle was an ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings span the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, and the arts. As the founder of the Peripatetic school of philosophy in the Lyceum in Athens, he began the wider Aristotelian tradition that followed, which set the groundwork for the development of modern science.
Read on Wikipedia → Find books by AristotleTherefore, the good of man must be the end of the science of politics.
Politicians also have no leisure, because they are always aiming at something beyond political life itself, power and glory, or happiness.
Democracy is when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
We make war that we may live in peace.
He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.
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Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.
For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.
Nature does nothing in vain.
Man is by nature a political animal.
All men by nature desire knowledge.
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire.
If one way be better than another, that you may be sure is nature's way.
In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.
Quality is not an act, it is a habit.
Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.
It is unbecoming for young men to utter maxims.
Men are swayed more by fear than by reverence.
The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.
Men create gods after their own image, not only with regard to their form but with regard to their mode of life.
Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.
It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.