Aristotle was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology.He is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle’s writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics.
Fifteen lessons from Aristotle:
1. The wise man does not expose himself needlessly to danger, since there are few things for which he cares sufficiently; but he is willing, in great crises, to give even his life – knowing that under certain conditions it is not worthwhile to live.
2. The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.
3. The young are permanently in a state resembling intoxication.
4. We become just by performing just action, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave action.
5. There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
6. Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.
7. To run away from trouble is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it not for some noble object but to escape some ill.
8. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
9. We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.
10. We praise a man who feels angry on the right grounds and against the right persons and also in the right manner at the right moment and for the right length of time.
11. You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
12. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
13. What it lies in our power to do, it lies in our power not to do.
14. Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.
15. Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.