Aristotle 384 BC – 322 BC
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath born in Stagira in 384 BC. A student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great, he founded the Peripatetic school at the Lyceum in Athens. His writings span logic, metaphysics, ethics, politics, biology, and poetics, and his system of formal logic dominated Western thought for nearly two millennia. He developed virtue ethics in the Nicomachean Ethics and a teleological account of nature in the Physics. His work shaped medieval Christian and Islamic philosophy and remains foundational to Western intellectual history.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Greek
- Era
- Ancient
- Movements
- Peripatetic School, Ancient Greek
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Aristotle:
“Man is by nature a political animal.”
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Attributed to Aristotle:
“All men by nature desire to know.”
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Attributed to Aristotle:
“Happiness depends upon ourselves.”
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Attributed to Aristotle:
“The good for man is an activity of the soul in conformity with virtue.”
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Attributed to Aristotle:
“Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies.”
Quotes that are not actually from Aristotle
These lines are widely circulated as Aristotle, but they do not appear in Aristotle's works. Each entry below identifies the actual source.
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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Will Durant wrote this in his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy as his own one-sentence paraphrase summarizing Aristotle's discussion of habit and moral character in the Nicomachean Ethics. The phrasing is Durant's; it does not appear in any of Aristotle's surviving works.
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“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Despite being widely circulated as Aristotle, this exact phrasing has not been traced to any of his works. The earliest verifiable English-language appearances are from the 20th century and the original author has not been identified. The sentiment is broadly compatible with Aristotelian thought but the formulation is modern.
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“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”
The injunction to 'know thyself' was a maxim inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, attributed in antiquity to figures such as Thales, Solon, and Chilon long before Aristotle. The English phrasing 'knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom' is a modern restatement and is not from Aristotle.