Aristotle

Aristotle, who looks into all things, wonders about Solon’s statementthat no one can be called happy while still alive — even though this one who had lived well and died well could be called happy — if their reputation is poor, their descendants miserable.

Aristotle says that there are small creatures on the river Hypanis that live only a day.

It is as much by custom as infirmity, says Aristotle, that women tear their hair, bite their nails, and eat coals and earth, and more by custom than nature that men abuse themselves with one another.

That which Aristotle reports of some who called both him and Anaxagoras, and others of their profession, wise but not prudent, in not applying their study to more profitable things — though I do not well digest this verbal distinction — that will not, however, serve to excuse my pedants, for to see the low and necessitous fortune wherewith they are content, we have rather reason to pronounce that they are neither wise nor prudent.

these are the very words of Aristotle:

but to dive farther than that, and to have cudgelled my brains in the study of Aristotle, the monarch of all modern learning, or particularly addicted myself to any one science, I have never done it;

“That the touchstone and square of all solid imagination, and of all truth, was an absolute conformity to Aristotle’s doctrine;

Aristotle’s principles will then be no more principles to him, than those of Epicurus and the Stoics:

A hundred students have got the pox before they have come to read Aristotle’s lecture on temperance.

I am of Plutarch’s mind, that Aristotle did not so much trouble his great disciple with the knack of forming syllogisms, or with the elements of geometry, as with infusing into him good precepts concerning valor, prowess, magnanimity, temperance, and the contempt of fear;

William Guerente, who wrote a comment upon Aristotle;

and Aristotle, says that the good legislators had more respect to friendship than to justice.

” This precept, though abominable in the sovereign and perfect friendship I speak of, is nevertheless very sound as to the practice of the ordinary and customary ones, and to which the saying that Aristotle had so frequent in his mouth, “O my friends, there is no friend,” may very fitly be applied.

All things, wills, thoughts, opinions, goods, wives, children, honors, and lives, being in effect common betwixt them, and that absolute concurrence of affections being no other than one soul in two bodies (according to that very proper definition of Aristotle, they can neither lend nor give anything to one another.

The other testimony from antiquity, to which some would apply this discovery of the New World, is in Aristotle;

But this relation of Aristotle no more agrees with our new-found lands than the other.

Aristotle says, that sows of lead will melt and run with cold and the rigor of winter just as with a vehement heat.

so Aristotle says that no excellent soul is exempt from a mixture of madness;

and to take that for current pay which is under a man’s value is pusillanimity and cowardice, according to, Aristotle.

and that age having deprived him of all other power, it was the only remaining remedy to maintain his authority in his family, and to keep him from being neglected and despised by all around,” in truth, not only old age, but all other imbecility, according to Aristotle, is the promoter of avarice;

married at three-and-thirty years of age, and concur in the opinion of thirty-five, which is said to be that of Aristotle.

For according to Aristotle, the poet, of all artificers, is the fondest of his work.

and Aristotle is of opinion that a prudent and just man may be intemperate and inconsistent.

Aristotle, in proof of this, instances the Various calls of partridges, according to the situation of places.

Aristotle says that the cuttle-fish casts a gut out of her throat as long as a line, which she extends and draws back at pleasure;

— Aristotle is of opinion “That the nightingales teach their young ones to sing, and spend a great deal of time and care in it;

for which reason Aristotle himself attributes to them this science.

Of what advantage can we conceive the knowledge of so many things was to Yarro and Aristotle?

” and that foolish title that Aristotle prefixes to one of his, order only afforded him a few lucid intervals which he employed in composing his book, and at last made him kill himself, Of the Mortal Gods;

For which reason Aristotle holds him equally exempt from virtue and vice.

You are permitted to embrace Aristotle’s opinions of the immortality of the soul with as much zeal as your honor and life, and to give the lie to Plato thereupon, and shall they be interdicted to doubt him?

Aristotle ordinarily heaps up a great number of other men’s opinions and beliefs, to compare them with his own, and to let us see how much he has gone beyond them, and how much nearer he approaches to the likelihood of truth;

Why hath not Aristotle only, but most of the philosophers, affected difficulty, if not to set a greater value upon the vanity of the subject, and amuse the curiosity of our minds by giving them this hollow and fleshless bone to pick?

Chrysippus said “That what Plato and Aristotle had writ, concerning logic, they had only done in sport, and by way of exercise;

Aristotle one while says it is the spirit, and another the world;

The god of scholastic knowledge is Aristotle;

I do not know why I should not as willingly embrace either the ideas of Plato, or the atoms of Epicurus, or the plenum or vacuum of Leucippus and Democritus, or the water of Thales, or the infinity of nature of Anaximander, or the air of Diogenes, or the numbers and symmetry of Pythagoras, or the infinity of Parmenides, or the One of Musaeus, or the water and fire of Apollodorus, or the similar parts of Anaxagoras, or the discord and friendship of Empedocles, or the fire of Heraclitus, or any other opinion of that infinite confusion of opinions and determinations, which this fine human reason produces by its certitude and clearsightedness in every thing it meddles withal, as I should the opinion of Aristotle upon this subject of the principles of natural things;

”This answer would be good among the cannibals, who enjoy the happiness of a long, quiet, and peaceable life, without Aristotle’s precepts, and without the knowledge of the name of physics;

Let us not forget Aristotle, who held the soul to be that which naturally causes the body to move, which he calls entelechia, with as cold an invention as any of the rest;

Democritus and Aristotle throughout the whole body Ut bona sæpe valetudo cum dicitur esse Corporis, et non est tamen hæc pars ulla valentis;

The sight of our judgment is, to truth, the same that the owl’s eyes are to the splendor of the sun, says Aristotle.

No one doubts what Aristotle has established upon this subject, no more than all the ancients in general, who handle it with a wavering belief:

Aristotle, an excrement drawn from the aliment of the blood, the last which is diffused over our members;

Aristotle and Democritus are of opinion that women have no sperm, and that ’tis nothing but a sweat that they distil in the heat of pleasure and motion, and that contributes nothing at all to generation.

Before the principles that Aristotle introduced were in reputation, other principles contented human reason, as these satisfy us now.

Aristotle and Cicero both say the same;

Cicero and Diodorus say that in their time the Chaldees kept a register of four hundred thousand and odd years, Aristotle, Pliny, and others, that Zoroaster flourished six thousand years before Plato’s time.

Aristotle attributes the admiring nothing to magnanimity;

Aristotle gives it the first place among external goods;

Little men, says Aristotle, are pretty, but not handsome;

Aristotle reputes it the office of magnanimity openly and professedly to love and hate;

Whoever is ignorant of Aristotle, according to their rule, is in some sort ignorant of himself;

It was told to Aristotle that some one had spoken ill of him:

The most of our civil governments, as Aristotle says, “leave, after the manner of the Cyclopes, to every one the ordering of their wives and children, according to their own foolish and indiscreet fancy;

Aristotle says, that anger sometimes serves for arms to virtue and valor.

not that Aristotle and Varro, for example, were not, peradventure, as learned as he;

” His words, according to Aristotle, are the only words that have motion and action, the only substantial words.

And Aristotle says that in a certain nation, where the women were in common, they assigned the children to their fathers by their resemblance.

after that, Erasistratus, Aristotle’s grandson, overthrew what Chrysippus had written;

and private men, says Aristotle, serve virtue more painfully and highly than those in authority do:

’Tis the business of the gods, says Aristotle, and from which both their beatitude and ours proceed.

For my part, I will take Aristotle at his word, who says, that “bashfulness is an ornament to youth, but a reproach to old age.

A man, says Aristotle, must approach his wife with prudence and temperance, lest in dealing too lasciviously with her, the extreme pleasure make her exceed the bounds of reason.

I do not find in Aristotle most of my ordinary motions;

for Aristotle says that to do any one a kindness, in a certain phrase of his country, is to kill him.

they say ’tis Aristotle’s.

They are delights, says Aristotle, that a only please the baser sort of the people, and that vanish from the memory as soon as the people are sated with them, and for which no serious and judicious man can have any esteem.

Strip him of his gown, his hood, and his Latin, let him not batter our ears with Aristotle, pure and simple, you will take him for one of us, or worse.

for there have been such, as savage as any human opinion could conceive, who, nevertheless, have maintained their body with as much health and length of life as any Plato or Aristotle could invent.

When Thetis, says Aristotle, flatters Jupiter, when the Lacedaemonians flatter the Athenians, they do not put them in mind of the good they have done them, which is always odious, but of the benefits they have received from them.

But I have yet more avoided receiving than sought occasions of giving, and moreover, according to Aristotle, it is more easy.

Aristotle boasts somewhere in his writings that he affected it:

Let us look down upon the poor people that we see scattered upon the face of the earth, prone and intent upon their business, that neither know Aristotle nor Cato, example nor precept;

and then he does it with a better grace than Aristotle, upon whom death presses with a double weight, both of itself and of so long a premeditation;

Truly, it is much more easy to speak like Aristotle, and to live like Caesar, than to speak and live as Socrates did;

” Aristotle says that the right of command appertains to the beautiful;

Aristotle, ’tis said, was reproached for having been too merciful to a wicked man:

Aristotle wrote to be understood;

as Aristotle, whose valuing and undervaluing himself often spring from the same air of arrogance.

whoever will call to mind the excess of his past anger, and to what a degree that fever transported him, will see the deformity of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceive a more just hatred against it;

Now, upon this subject, setting aside the examples I have gathered from books, and what Aristotle says of Andron the Argian, that he traveled over the arid sands of Lybia without drinking:

I don’t know about this, but there are wonderful instances of it that Socrates, Xenophon, and Aristotle, men of irreproachable authority, relate.

There are some, as Aristotle says, who out of a savage kind of stupidity dislike them;