Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
The investigation of the truth is in one way hard, in another easy. An indication of this is found in the fact that no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while, on the other hand, no one fails entirely, but everyone says something true about the nature of all things, and while individually they contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed.
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Metaphysics
It is not to avoid cold or hunger that tyrants cover themselves with blood; and states decree the most illustrious rewards, not to him who catches a thief, but to him who kills an usurper.
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Politics
Money ... is founded merely on convention; its currency and value depending on the mutable wills of men.
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Politics
The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.
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Poetics
All learning is derived from things previously known.
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The Nicomachean Ethics
Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
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Rhetoric
Let us define rhetoric to be: "A faculty of considering all the possible means of persuasion on every subject;" for this is the business of no one of the other arts, each of which is fit enough to inform or persuade respecting its own subject; medicine, for instance, on what conduces to health or sickness; and geometry, on the subject of relations incidental to magnitudes; and arithmetic, on the subject of numbers; and in the same way the remaining arts and sciences. But rhetoric, as I may say, seems able to consider the means of persuasion on any given subject whatsoever. And hence I declare it to have for its province, as an art, no particular limited class of subjects.
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Rhetoric
Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.
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Poetics
A citizen is a constituent part of a whole or system, which invests him with powers and qualifies him for functions, for which, in his individual capacity, he is totally unfit; and independently of which system, he might subsist indeed as a solitary savage, but could never attain that improved and happy state to which his progressive nature invariably tends.
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Politics
Men fancy that because doing wrong is in their own power, therefore to be just is easy. But it is not so: to lie with one's neighbour's wife, and to strike some one near, and the giving with the hand the bribe ... are easy acts, and in men's own power; but to do these things with the particular disposition is neither easy nor in their power.
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Nicomachean Ethics
Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.
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Poetics
What, then, is in each case the chief good? Surely it will be that to which all else that is done is but a means. And this in medicine will be health, and in tactics victory, and in architecture a house, and so forth in other cases.
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Nicomachean Ethics
A man who has been well trained will not in any case look for more accuracy than the nature of the matter allows; for to expect exact demonstration from a rhetorician is as absurd as to accept from a mathematician a statement only probable.
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Nicomachean Ethics
Remember that time slurs over everything, let all deeds fade, blurs all writings and kills all memories. Exempt are only those which dig into the hearts of men by love.
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letter to Alexander on the policy toward the Cities
Those who assert that the mathematical sciences say nothing of the beautiful or the good are in error. For these sciences say and prove a great deal about them; if they do not expressly mention them, but prove attributes which are their results or definitions, it is not true that they tell us nothing about them. The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.
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Metaphysics
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else.
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Nicomachean Ethics
Beauty is the gift from God.
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Nicomachean Ethics
The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.
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Nicomachean Ethics
Neglect of an effective birth control policy is a never-failing source of poverty which, in turn, is the parent of revolution and crime.
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Politics
To those who cite the disreputable sorts of pleasure one may fairly reply that these are not really pleasant. For we ought not, because they are pleasant to the wrongly disposed, to think they are generally pleasant, or to any but these; just as things that are wholesome or sweet or bitter to the sick, are not so to all, and as things are not really white that seem so to those suffering from opthalmia.
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Nicomachean Ethics