Aristotle

 

Life

 

        Aristotle was born in Stagira, a Greek colony in the Thracian peninsula Chalcidice, in 384 B.C.  His father, Nicomachus, was court physician to King Amyntas of Macedonia, and from this Aristotle was incredibly influenced in his life.  While he was still a boy his father died.  At age 17 his guardian, Proxenus, sent him to Athens, the intellectual center of the world, to complete his education.  He remained in Athens as a pupil of Plato from age eighteen to thirty-seven.  In his later years at the academy he was attending, he began to lecture the subject of rhetoric, until his mentor Plato died in 347 B.C.  He then, at the invitation of his friend Hermeas, ruler of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, went to visit him at his court.  He stayed three years and while there, married Pythias, the niece of the King.  In later life he was married a second time to a woman named Herpyllis, who bore him a son, Nichomachus.  He then traveled back to Stagira where King Philip of Macedon asked him to tutor his son Alexander, who was then thirteen, for the next five years.  Both King Philip and his son Alexander respected and honored Aristotle very much.  They provided him with funding that helped in his research.  Upon the death of Philip, Alexander succeeded to the kingship, and so Aristotle's work being finished, he returned to Athens, which he had not visited since the death of Plato.  He found Plato’s school flourishing under Xenocrates, and Platonism the dominant philosophy of Athens.  So he then set up his own school at a place called the Lyceum.   For the next thirteen years he devoted his energies to his teaching and composing his philosophical treatises.  At Alexander’s sudden death in 323 B.C., the government in Athens was overthrown, and a general reaction against it occurred.  Aristotle was charged with impiety.  He fled to Chalcis in Euboea to escape prosecution.  He mysteriously died there after his first year of residency after complaining of a stomach illness in 322 B.C.   

Aristotle

Quotes

 

“Liars when they speak the truth are not believed.”                                                    

 

“All men by nature desire knowledge.”

“What is a friend?  A single soul dwelling in two bodies.”

 

“Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.”

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”

“Plausible impossibilities should be preferred to unconvincing possibilities.”

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

“Count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is over self.”

“The mathematical sciences particularly exhibit order, symmetry, and limitation; and these are the greatest forms of the beautiful.”

“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.”

 

 

Sources:

Catholic Encyclopedia: Aristotle

 

Aristotle quotations

Philosophy Resources

 

 

Plato and Aristotle