Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
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.
ARISTOTLE
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.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Happiness, whether consisting in pleasure or virtue, or both, is more often found with those who are highly cultivated in their minds and in their character, and have only a moderate share of external goods, than among those who possess external goods to a useless extent but are deficient in higher qualities.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The law is reason unaffected by desire.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
But the merchant, if faithful to his principles, always employs his money reluctantly for any other purpose than that of augmenting itself.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Neglect of an effective birth control policy is a never-failing source of poverty which, in turn, is the parent of revolution and crime.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Money ... is founded merely on convention; its currency and value depending on the mutable wills of men.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
A beautiful object, whether it be a picture of a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but most also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
A family, to be complete, must consist of freemen and slaves; and as every complex object naturally resolves itself into simple elements, we must consider the elements of a family--the master and servant, the husband and wife, the father and children; what all of these are in themselves, and what are the relations which they naturally and properly bear to each other.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
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.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
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.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs, but not of being unable to defend himself with speach and reason, when the use of rational speech is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which therefore we inquire, present us with alternative possibilities.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
Nature flies from the infinite, for the infinite is unending or imperfect, and Nature ever seeks to amend.
ARISTOTLE
On the Generation of Animals