Aristotle Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Aristotle with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
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Focused topic collections for Aristotle
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“All men by nature desire to know.”
Meaning & context
Aristotle treats the desire for knowledge as a basic human tendency, giving curiosity a foundational place in the movement from perception toward understanding.
Source details
Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter I, W. D. Ross translation (1908), validated Wikisource scan leaf 21. 'All men by nature desire to know' opens the work before the discussion of sensation, memory, experience, art and knowledge. This remains ancient philosophy mediated by translation, not a modern empirical finding about cognition.
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“By doing just actions we come to be just.”
Meaning & context
Character is formed through repeated conduct: practicing just actions helps turn justice from an abstract ideal into a stable disposition.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II; Aristotle explains virtue as something developed through corresponding actions.
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“Friendship helps the young to keep from error.”
Meaning & context
Aristotle gives friendship a practical educational role: trusted companions can help younger people avoid mistakes by supplying counsel, example and shared judgment.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter I, Project Gutenberg #8438. The sentence occurs in Aristotle’s opening inventory of why friendship is necessary across different stages of life.
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“Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities.”
Meaning & context
Friendship has a public dimension as well as a private one because trust and goodwill help hold communities together.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII; the discussion connects friendship with social and political association.
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“Every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”
Meaning & context
Actions and choices are intelligible because they pursue something taken to be good, even when people disagree about what the good actually is.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book I; the opening argument begins from the idea that action aims at a perceived good.
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“A desire for Friendship may arise quickly but not Friendship itself.”
Meaning & context
Initial liking or a wish to become friends can happen immediately, but Aristotle reserves mature friendship for a relationship tested by time, familiarity and demonstrated character.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #8438. Aristotle has just argued that people must become mutually known and prove themselves fit objects of friendship before the relationship is complete.
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“No one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world.”
Meaning & context
Friendship is treated not as an optional luxury but as part of a flourishing life, even when material needs and other advantages are already supplied.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII; Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship by treating it as necessary to a good life.
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“Virtue then is a state apt to exercise deliberate choice, being in the relative mean, determined by reason.”
Meaning & context
Virtue is treated as a stable capacity for deliberate choice, guided by practical judgment rather than by extremes of impulse or deficiency.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter VI; the public-domain English translation defines virtue through deliberate choice and the relative mean.
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“And so the good man ought to be Self-loving: because by doing what is noble he will have advantage himself and will do good to others.”
Meaning & context
Aristotle distinguishes a worthy form of self-love from selfish appetite: the good person values the rational and noble part of life in a way that benefits both the self and other people.
Source details
Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, Chapter VIII, Project Gutenberg #8438. The surrounding argument explicitly contrasts this noble “Self-loving” with the blameworthy form that grasps at wealth, honours and bodily pleasures, so the line is not a defense of simple selfishness.
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“Law is reason without desire.”
Meaning & context
Good law is idealized as judgment governed by reason rather than by the changing appetites or personal passions of an individual ruler.
Source details
Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter XVI, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. In comparing rule by a person with rule by law, Aristotle says that passion can affect even the best rulers and concludes that law is reason without desire.
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“Man is naturally a political animal.”
Meaning & context
Human beings naturally form communities in which speech, judgment, cooperation, law, and shared ideas of justice shape common life.
Source details
Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book I, Chapter II, William Ellis translation; represented through the Dent edition first issued in 1912 and Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle argues that the city is a natural association and says that man is naturally a political animal; this remains ancient political philosophy in translation, not a modern empirical classification.
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“The safety of the ship is the common business of all of them.”
Meaning & context
People with different roles can still share responsibility for preserving the larger community on which all of their particular roles depend.
Source details
Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter IV, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle compares citizens with sailors whose different offices share one common concern: the safety of the ship, paralleling the safety of the political community.
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“All those governments which have a common good in view are rightly established and strictly just.”
Meaning & context
Political rule is judged by whether it aims at a shared good rather than merely advancing the private advantage of those holding power.
Source details
Politics: A Treatise on Government, Book III, Chapter VI, William Ellis translation; represented through the 1912 Dent witness / Project Gutenberg #6762. Aristotle distinguishes governments ordered toward the common good from regimes serving rulers’ private advantage; the exact sentence falls before the edition’s Chapter VII heading and therefore belongs to Chapter VI.
