Aristotle Causes Quotes & Sayings

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake. — Anne Carson

The final cause, then, produces motion through being loved. — Aristotle.

All terrible things are more terrible if they give us no chance of retrieving a blunder - either no chance at all, or only one that depends on our enemies and not ourselves. Those things are also worse which we cannot, or cannot easily, help. Speaking generally, anything causes us to feel fear that when it happens to, or threatens, others causes us to feel pity. — Aristotle.

Now I realize, of course, that many readers will acknowledge that we do in fact have these reactions, but would nevertheless write them off as mere reactions. "Our tendency to find something personally disgusting," they will sniff, "doesn't show that there is anything objectively wrong with it." This is the sort of stupidity-masquerading-as-insight that absolutely pervades modern intellectual life, and it has the same source as so many other contemporary intellectual pathologies: the abandonment of the classical realism of the great Greek and Scholastic philosophers, and especially of Aristotle's doctrine of the four causes. — Edward Feser

We do not know a truth without knowing its cause. — Aristotle.

Money was established for exchange, but interest causes it to be reproduced by itself. Therefore this way of earning money is greatly in conflict with the natural law. — Aristotle.

There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind ... there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends. — Bertrand Russell

Love is the cause of unity in all things. — Aristotle.

Now, the causes being four, it is the business of the student of nature to know about them all, and if he refers his problems back to all of them, he will assign the "why" in the way proper to his science-the matter, the form, the mover, that for the sake of which. — Aristotle.

Yes the truth is that men's ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice. — Aristotle.

Our virtues are voluntary (and in fact we are in a sense ourselves partly the cause of our moral dispositions, and it is our having a certain character that makes us set up an end of a certain kind), it follows that our vices are voluntary also; they are voluntary in the same manner as our virtues. — Aristotle.

If he wishes to ground each of the four causes in an objectively given framework, Aristotle will need to advance some more detailed forms of argumentation. It will not suffice simply to point out that we may tend to be unsatisfied until we have cited all four causes, but then become satisfied once we have. Since he — Anonymous

The things best to know are first principles and causes, but these things are perhaps the most difficult for men to grasp, for they are farthest removed from the senses ... — Aristotle.

Demonstration is also something necessary, because a demonstration cannot go otherwise than it does, ... And the cause of this lies with the primary premises/principles. — Aristotle.

The God of St. Thomas and Dante is a God Who loves, the god of Aristotle is a god who does not refuse to be loved; the love that moves the heavens and the stars in Aristotle is the love of the heavens and the stars for god, but the love that moves them in St. Thomas and Dante is the love of God for the world; between these two motive causes there is all the difference between an efficient cause on the one hand, and a final cause on the other. — Etienne Gilson

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula. — Aristotle.

Let us first understand the facts and then we may seek the cause. — Aristotle.

If you prove the cause, you at once prove the effect; and conversely nothing can exist without its cause. — Aristotle.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. Aristotle — Christine Zolendz

Bacon not only despised the syllogism, but undervalued mathematics, presumably as insufficiently experimental. He was virulently hostile to Aristotle , but he thought very highly of Democritus , Although he did not deny that the course of nature exemplifies a Divine purpose, he objected to any admixture of teleological explanation in the actual investigation of phenomena; everything, he held, should be explained as following necessarily from efficient causes . — Bertrand Russell

Conscientious and careful physicians allocate causes of disease to natural laws, while the ablest scientists go back to medicine for their first principles. — Aristotle.

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a questionable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body. — Aristotle.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions. — Aristotle.

In all things which have a plurality of parts, and which are not a total aggregate but a whole of some sort distinct from the parts, there is some cause. — Aristotle.

Thus every action must be due to one or other of seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reasoning, anger, or appetite. — Aristotle.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself. — Aristotle.

For nature by the same cause, provided it remain in the same condition, always produces the same effect, so that either coming-to-be or passing-away will always result. — Aristotle.

It is the active exercise of our faculties in conformity with virtue that causes happiness, and the opposite activities its opposite. — Aristotle.

It is clear, then, that wisdom is knowledge having to do with certain principles and causes. But now, since it is this knowledge that we are seeking, we must consider the following point: of what kind of principles and of what kind of causes is wisdom the knowledge? — Aristotle.

To leave the number of births unrestricted, as is done in most states, inevitably causes poverty among the citizens, and poverty produces crime and faction. — Aristotle.