Quotes & Sayings About Nature Aristotle

Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, at every moment of our life: all other influences are temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle says: It is not wealth but character that lasts.
And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves; for fortune may always change, but not character. Therefore, subjective blessings - a noble nature, a capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and most important elements in happiness; so that we should be more intent on promoting and preserving such qualities than on the possession of external wealth and external honor. — Arthur Schopenhauer

People of superior refinement and of active disposition identify happiness with honour; for this is roughly speaking, the end of political life. — Aristotle.

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean. — Aristotle.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of man's everyday wants. — Aristotle.

There is nothing grand or noble in having the use of a slave, in so far as he is a slave; or in issuing commands about necessary things. But it is an error to suppose that every sort of rule is despotic like that of a master over slaves, for there is as great a difference between the rule over freemen and the rule over slaves as there is between slavery by nature and freedom by nature . — Aristotle.

The sun, moving as it does, sets up processes of change and becoming and decay, and by its agency the finest and sweetest water is every day carried up and is dissolved into vapour and rises to the upper region, where it is condensed again by the cold and so returns to the earth. This, as we have said before, is the regular course of nature. — Aristotle.

It is the mark of an educated mind to expect that amount of exactness which the nature of the particular subject admits. It is equally unreasonable to accept merely probable conclusions from a mathematician and to demand strict demonstration from an orator. — Aristotle.

Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god. — Aristotle.

We have then, in the first part of The Faerie Queene, four of the seven deadly sins depicted in the more important passages of the four several books; those sins being much more elaborately and powerfully represented than the virtues, which are opposed to them, and which are personified in the titular heroes of the respective books. The alteration which made these personified virtues the centre each of a book was probably part of the reconstruction on the basis of Aristotle Ethics.
The nature of the debt to Aristotle suggests that Spenser did not borrow directly from the Greek, but by way of modern translations. — Janet Spens

The true nature of a thing is the highest it can become. — Aristotle.

For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, (15) as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. — Aristotle.

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. — Aristotle.

Now to investigate whether Being is one and motionless is not a contribution to the science of Nature. — Aristotle.

In [the soul] one part naturally rules, and the other is subject, and the virtue of the ruler we maintain to be different from that of the subject; the one being the virtue of the rational, and the other of the irrational part. Now, it is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature. — Aristotle.

The student of politics therefore as well as the psychologist must study the nature of the soul. — Aristotle.

It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it. — Aristotle.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit. — Aristotle.

Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure. — Alan Bradley

God and nature create nothing that does not fulfill a purpose — Aristotle.

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. — Aristotle.

Aristotle and Bacon can therefore be seen respectively as the grandfather and the father of the modern branch of the philosophy of science called "confirmation theory," that is, the study of how scientific hypotheses and theories are confirmed by evidence. Evidence clearly has a very significant bearing on the decisions of scientific communities to accept or reject certain theories, but spelling out the precise nature of that relationship is difficult — Howard Margolis

The infinitesimal seedlings became a forest of trees that grew courteously, correcting the distances between themselves as they shaped themselves to the promptings of available light and moisture, tempering the climate and the temperaments of the Scots, as the driest land became moist and the wettest land became dry, seedlings finding a mean between extremes, and the trees constructing a moderate zone for themselves even into what I would have called tundra, until I understood the fact that Aristotle taught, while walking in a botanic garden, that the middle is fittest to discern the extremes. ("Interim") — William S. Wilson

WHEN RELIGION CANNOT KNEEL Aristotle said democracy would only work in a culture already committed to virtue. There is no communal myth left that teaches us the essentially tragic nature of human life; there is no vision that proclaims the primacy of the common good; there is no transcendent image that makes human virtue a divine reflection. There is No One to reflect and No One to love and serve. I do not want to belong to a religion that cannot kneel. I do not want to live in a world where there is No One to adore. It is a lonely and labored world if I am its only center. My life is too short to discover wisdom on my own, to identify and properly name my own self-importance, to learn how to love if I have to start at zero. — Richard Rohr

Nonetheless, by the time we arrive at the eighteenth century and the time of the founders, marriage and the family came to look very much as Aristotle had pictured it. In the previous centuries, Lutheran reforms had lodged marriage into the civil structure of society and made it more a concern of civil law,11 but, joined by Calvin, Protestantism retained parental control over the right of children to marry. John Locke, however, saw marriage as contracted political society, and thus his image of the family as a commonwealth made up of combined individuals parallel his image of the formation of the larger political commonwealth as well.12 Furthermore, Locke declares that parents are, "by the law of nature, under an obligation to preserve, nourish and educate" their children.13 Since government is instituted to enforce the laws of nature, Locke states that government should make laws that enforce "the security of the marriage bed.'14 What — Jean Bethke Elshtain

for the same things are not 'knowable relatively to us' and 'knowable' without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, (20) but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. — Aristotle.

I say that habit's but a long practice, friend, and this becomes men's nature in the end. — Aristotle.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies. — Aristotle.

It is the mark of an educated mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness where only an approximation is possible. — Aristotle.

If then nature makes nothing without some end in view, nothing to no purpose, it must be that nature has made all of them for the sake of man. — Aristotle.

Nature abhors a vacuum. — Aristotle.

All people by nature desire to know. An example of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves. — Aristotle.

We must not feel a childish disgust at the investigations of the meaner animals. For there is something marvelous in all natural things. — Aristotle.

Equity bids us be merciful to the weakness of human nature; to think less about the laws than about the man who framed them, and less about what he said than about what he meant; not to consider the actions of the accused so much as his intentions; nor this or that detail so much as the whole story; to ask not what a man is now but what he has always or usually been. — Aristotle.

In money-lenders' capital the form M-C-M is reduced to the two extremes without a mean, M-M , money exchanged for more money, a form that is incompatible with the nature of money, and therefore remains inexplicable from the standpoint of the circulation of commodities. Hence Aristotle: since chrematistic is a double science, one part belonging to commerce, the other to economic, the latter being necessary and praiseworthy, the former based on circulation and with justice disapproved (for it is not based on Nature, but on mutual cheating), therefore the usurer is most rightly hated, because money itself is the source of his gain, and is not used for the purposes for which it was invented. — Karl Marx

To be ignorant of motion is to be ignorant of nature — Aristotle.

Nature, as we say, does nothing without some purpose; and for thepurpose of making mana political animal she has endowed him alone among the animals with the power of reasoned speech. — Aristotle.

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

Man by Nature desires to know. — Aristotle.

Bacon first taught the world the true method of the study of nature, and rescued science from that barbarism in which the followers of Aristotle, by a too servile imitation of their master. — Thomas Young

Every formed disposition of the soul realizes its full nature in relation to and dealing with that class of objects by which it is its nature to be corrupted or improved. — Aristotle.

Art takes nature as its model. — Aristotle.

Nature does nothing in vain. — Aristotle.

Neither by nature, therefore, nor contrary to nature are the virtues present; they are instead present in us who are of such a nature as to receive them, and who are completed1 through habit. — Aristotle.

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

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be. — Aristotle.

Of the irrational part of the soul again one division appears to be common to all living things, and of a vegetative nature. — Aristotle.

Man by nature wants to know. — Aristotle.

But nature flies from the infinite; for the infinite is imperfect, and nature always seeks an end. — Aristotle.

The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive the,. and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit. — Aristotle.

Since to avoid the painful and aim at the pleasurable is one of the most obvious tendencies of human nature. — Aristotle.

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends. — Aristotle.

The shape of the heaven is of necessity spherical; for that is the shape most appropriate to its substance and also by nature primary. — Aristotle.

Leibniz combines Aristotelian teleology in the notion that the nature of a thing provides for its unfolding in a certain fashion with the modern idea that the nature of a thing is within it. Because the forms are internal in the way that they are not with Aristotle, the harmony of the world has to be pre-established by God. — Charles Taylor

But such a life will be higher than mere human nature, because a man
will live thus, not in so far as he is man but in so far as there is in
him a divine Principle: and in proportion as this Principle excels
his composite nature so far does the Working thereof excel that in
accordance with any other kind of Excellence: and therefore, if pure
Intellect, as compared with human nature, is divine, so too will the
life in accordance with it be divine compared with man's ordinary life.
[Sidenote: 1178a] Yet must we not give ear to those who bid one as man
to mind only man's affairs, or as mortal only mortal things; but, so far
as we can, make ourselves like immortals and do all with a view to
living in accordance with the highest Principle in us, for small as it
may be in bulk yet in power and preciousness it far more excels all the
others. — Aristotle.

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal. — Aristotle.

The young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine. — Aristotle.

Such [communistic] legislation may have a specious appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody will become everybody's friend, especially when some one is heard denouncing the evils now existing in states, suits about contracts, convictions for perjury, flatteries of rich men and the like, which are said to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils, however, are due to a very different cause - the wickedness of human nature. Indeed, we see that there is much more quarrelling among those who have all things in common, though there are not many of them when compared with the vast numbers who have private property. — Aristotle.

Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how. — Umberto Eco

A successful unification of quantum theory and relativity would necessarily be a theory of the universe as a whole. It would tell us, as Aristotle and Newton did before, what space and time are, what the cosmos is, what things are made of, and what kind of laws those things obey. Such a theory will bring about a radical shift - a revolution - in our understanding of what nature is. It must also have wide repercussions, and will likely bring about, or contribute to, a shift in our understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the rest of the universe. — Lee Smolin

You belong everywhere you go. That's just how you are. — Benjamin Alire Saenz

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom Homer denounces - the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts. — Aristotle.

Nature operates in the shortest way possible. — Aristotle.

He who is ignorant of Motion, says Aristotle , is necessarily ignorant of all natural things ... Not only was he entirely in the dark respecting the Laws, he was completely wrong in his conception of the nature of Motion ... He thought that every body in motion naturally tends to rest. — George Henry Lewes

Is it not evident, in these last hundred years (when the Study of Philosophy has been the business of all the Virtuosi in Christendome) that almost a new Nature has been revealed to us? that more errours of the School have been detected, more useful Experiments in Philosophy have been made, more Noble Secrets in Opticks, Medicine, Anatomy, Astronomy, discover'd, than in all those credulous and doting Ages from Aristotle to us? So true it is that nothing spreads more fast than Science, when rightly and generally cultivated. — John Dryden

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time. — Alfred Marshall

Since Socrates and Plato first speculated on the nature of the human mind, serious thinkers through the ages - from Aristotle to Descartes, from Aeschylus to Strindberg and Ingmar Bergman - have thought it wise to understand oneself and one's behavior. — Eric Kandel

Conservatism, we are told, is out-of-date. This charge is preposterous and we ought to boldly say so. The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. [ ... ] These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. [ ... ] To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle 's Politics are out of date. — Barry Goldwater

Nature herself, as has been often said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure. Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end. — Aristotle.

And this lies in the nature of things: What people are potentially is revealed in actuality by what they produce. — Aristotle.

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle.

Man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle.

In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous. — Aristotle.

The fire at Lipara, Xenophanes says, ceased once for sixteen years, and came back in the seventeenth. And he says that the lavastream from Aetna is neither of the nature of fire, nor is it continuous, but it appears at intervals of many years. — Aristotle.

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature. — Aristotle.

When you drop a hammer and a feather together, which one hits the ground first? If you pose this question to the general public, the most expected answer is based on common sense, that the heavier objects fall faster to the ground. David Scott, the seventh man to set foot on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission, carried out this simple experiment. dropped a hammer and a feather together He onto the moon's surface and expectedly they fell on the ground together. This demonstrated Galileo's genius and corrected the general misconception that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones because they have more affinity towards the Earth Even Aristotle was proved wrong. It becomes obvious that with bit of curiosity and application of mind and intuitiveness, one can understand the laws of nature better. — Sharad Nalawade

He who sees things grow from the beginning will have the best view of them. — Aristotle.

All men by nature desire knowledge. — Aristotle.

He who is by nature not his own but another's man is by nature a slave. — Aristotle.

I call that law universal, which is conformable merely to dictates of nature; for there does exist naturally an universal sense of right and wrong, which, in a certain degree, all intuitively divine, even should no intercourse with each other, nor any compact have existed. — Aristotle.

None of the moral virtues is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit. — Aristotle.

Every realm of nature is marvelous. — Aristotle.

From Hinduism to the monotheisms through to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, the common message is that we are all, naturally and potentially, inclined to reject the other, and to be intolerant and racist. Left to our own devices and our own emotions, we can be deaf, blind, dogmatic, closed and xenophobic: we are not born open-minded, respectful and pluralist. We become so through personal effort, education, self-mastery and knowledge. — Tariq Ramadan

All men desire by nature to know. — Aristotle.

Rhetoric is useful because truth and justice are in their nature stronger than their opposites; so that if decisions be made, not in conformity to the rule of propriety, it must have been that they have been got the better of through fault of the advocates themselves: and this is deserving reprehension. — Aristotle.

We physicists, on the other hand, must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion - which is indeed made plain by induction. — Aristotle.

Nature of man is not what he was born as, but what he is born for. — Aristotle.

Aristotle wisely reminds us, "It is the nature of desire not to be satisfied." When — Alexandra Stoddard

The deficiencies of nature are what art and education seek to fill up. — Aristotle.

The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law11 alone and not by nature. — Aristotle.

Nature creates nothing without a purpose. — Aristotle.

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

No one finds fault with defects which are the result of nature. — Aristotle.

No one chooses what does not rest with himself, but only what he thinks can be attained by his own act. — 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.

For it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs. — Aristotle.

The principle aim of gymnastics is the education of all youth and not simply that minority of people highly favored by nature. — Aristotle.

If the consequences are the same it is always better to assume the more limited antecedent, since in things of nature the limited, as being better, is sure to be found, wherever possible, rather than the unlimited. — Aristotle.

The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life. — Aristotle.

We, on the other hand, must take for granted that the things that exist by nature are, either all or some of them, in motion. — Aristotle.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature. — Aristotle.