"Aristotelian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... But Lessing's idea of the purpose of comedy is a combination of Aristotelian and mid-Victorian ideals: "die Sitten der Zuschauer zu bilden und zu bessern, ... wenn sie naemlich das Laster allezeit ungluecklich und die Tugend am Ende gluecklich sein laesst."[22] It is on the basis of this premise that he awards the comic crown to the Cap.[23] ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... granted to the serpent. It stupefies and bewilders the simple heart, which sees it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are Aristotelian, for it was Aristotle in his "Economics," and not a nursery rhymer, who wrote: "It is likewise well to rise before daybreak, for this contributes to health, wealth, and wisdom." "Early to bed and early to rise" ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... that, because the term Rationalism has been frequently employed within the last few years, it is of very recent origin either as a word or skeptical type. The Aristotelian Humanists of Helmstedt were called Rationalists in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and Comenius applied the same epithet to the Socinians in 1688.[1] It was a common word in England two hundred years ago. Nor was it imported into the English language ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... whether they do not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... approach that event of the Lady Arabella's life which reads like a romantic fiction: the catastrophe, too, is formed by the Aristotelian canon; for its misery, its pathos, and its terror even romantic fiction ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... painting all sides of life, and above all in drawing out the humour of its "lower spheres"—dealt a fatal blow not only at the pompous canons which the Rambler was pleased to call "the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism", [Footnote: Johnson's Works, v. 431.] but also at the view which found "human life to be a state where much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed". It would be hard to say whether Johnson found more in Fielding ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... Darwin will agree fully with Mr. Agassiz—that species, and he will add varieties, "exist as categories of thought," that is, as cognizable distinctions—which is all that we can make of the phrase here, whatever it may mean in the Aristotelian metaphysics. Admitting that species are only categories of thought, and not facts or things, how does this prevent the individuals, which are material things, from having varied in the course of time, so as to exemplify the present almost innumerable categories of thought, or ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... The Emperor came over to the Council of Florence with a number of bishops and divines. In the discussions that followed, Greek scholars were in demand; and one Eastern prelate, Bessarion, remained in Italy, became a cardinal, and did much for the study of Plato and the termination of the long Aristotelian reign. His fine collection of manuscripts was at the service of scholars, and is still at their service, in St. Mark's library at Venice. The fall of Constantinople drove several fugitives to seek a refuge in Italy, and some brought their books with them, ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... concurrent teaching of SS. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. The former says: "God calls [us] by [our] innermost thoughts," and: "See how the Father draws [and] by teaching delights [us]."(62) The latter quotes the Aristotelian axiom: "Actus moventis ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... Meanwhile in the east a completer knowledge of Aristotle's works had been communicated by the Nestorian Christians to their Mohammedan masters. Greek books were translated into Arabic, and Arabian philosophy, already monotheistic, became permeated with Aristotelian ideas. Moreover, the union of philosophical and medical studies among the Arabs caused them to attach a special value to Aristotle's treatises on natural science. In Spain the Arabs handed on their knowledge of Aristotle to the Jews, and it ...
— The Church and the Empire - Being an Outline of the History of the Church - from A.D. 1003 to A.D. 1304 • D. J. Medley
... and misosophy are here out of the question. Schools of real philosophy there are but two,—best named by the arch-philosopher of each, namely, Plato and Aristotle. Every man capable of philosophy at all (and there are not many such) is a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian. [9] Hooker, as may be discerned from the epithet of arch-philosopher applied to the Stagyrite, 'sensu monarchico', was of the latter family,—a comprehensive, vigorous, discreet, and ...
— The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Edited By Henry Nelson Coleridge
... perplexity. You cannot understand how sane creatures could imagine they had joined issue at all in most of these controversies. All the old methods of systematic thinking, the queer absurdities of the Aristotelian logic, have followed magic numbers and mystical numbers, and the Rumpelstiltskin magic of names now into the blackness of the unthinkable. You can no more understand our theological passions than you can understand the fancies that made all ancient peoples speak of their gods ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... Vinci must have worked pretty hard; on the other hand, many a government office clerk, village constable or elusive plumber may do (to all human appearance) no work at all, and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian universalism. What makes it difficult for the average man to be a universalist is that the average man has to be a specialist; he has not only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless society. This is generally true of males from the first ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... but without his old confidence: he became anxious and doubtful; he had seen so many first-rate men just miss a first-class. The brilliant creature analysed all his Aristotelian treatises, and wrote the synopses clear with marginal references on great pasteboard cards three feet by two, and so kept the whole subject before his eye, till he obtained a singular mastery. Same system with the historians: nor did he disdain the use of coloured inks. Then the brilliant ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... he brought out concerning the new star was that it upset the received Aristotelian doctrine of the immutability of the heavens. According to that doctrine the heavens were unchangeable, perfect, subject neither to growth nor to decay. Here was a body, not a meteor but a real distant star, which had not been visible and which would ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... mysterious and perplexing subject George Romanes appears to have had more to say but did not live to say it[31]. We may notice however that in 1889, in a paper read before the Aristotelian Society, on 'the Evidence of Design in Nature[32],' he appears to allow more weight than before to the argument that the method of physical development must be judged in the light of its result. This paper was part of a Symposium. Mr. S. Alexander has argued in a previous paper ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... relation between the emotions and the instincts has led to an animated controversy with Dr. McDougall, published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society for 1914-1915. According to the latter writer, every emotion has a corresponding instinct, and is merely the affective aspect of this instinct. Mr. Shand, on the contrary, holds that there are vastly more instincts than emotions, that a given instinct may enter into several ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... naturalists, is no immutable thing: it is rather perpetual movement, continual progression. Their discoveries batter a breach directly into the Aristotelian notion of species; they refuse to see in the animal world a collection of immutable types, distinct from all eternity, and corresponding, as Cuvier said, to so many particular thoughts of the Creator. Darwin especially congratulated himself upon having been able to deal this doctrine the coup de ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... though their philosophy 'was noised and celebrated in the schools, amid the din and pomp of professors.' It was not they, but Genseric and Attila and the barbarians, who destroyed the atomic philosophy. 'For, at a time when all human learning had suffered shipwreck, these planks of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, as being of a lighter and more inflated substance, were preserved and came down to us, while things more solid sank and almost ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... an Aristotelian, sir alchemist," he said sharply, "therefore we will be plain with you. You shall be lodged here with suitable means for your experiments until such time as your pretensions are justified—if they are. Should you prove yourself a wizard, a dabbler in the black ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... an elaborate machinery, it was said, for bringing out the merest self-evident truisms! But just as reasonably it might have been objected, when a mathematician illustrated the process of addition by saying 347, Behold what pompous nothings! These Aristotelian illustrations were purposely drawn from cases not open to dispute, and simply as exemplifications of the meaning: they were intentionally self-evident.] Precisely upon this model arose casuistry. A general rule, or ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... elsewhere he is not originating any new idea. Thucydides had pointed out the difference between the real and the alleged cause, and the Aristotelian dictum about revolutions, [Greek], draws the distinction between cause and occasion with the brilliancy of an epigram. But the explicit and rational investigation of the difference between [Greek] and [Greek] was reserved for Polybius. No canon of ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... ripe for its fall. The old, the outgrown, the doctrine which had become inadequate, was in this case Scholasticism; modern philosophy shows throughout—and most clearly at the start—an anti-Scholastic character. If up to this time Church dogma had ruled unchallenged in spiritual affairs, and the Aristotelian philosophy in things temporal, war is now declared against authority of every sort and freedom of thought is inscribed on the banner.[1] "Modern philosophy is Protestantism in the sphere of the thinking spirit" (Erdmann). Not that which has been considered ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... mechanics, which are established by pure geometry. The most important result established in Book I is the principle of the lever. This was known to Plato and Aristotle, but they had no real proof. The Aristotelian Mechanics merely 'refers' the lever 'to the circle', asserting that the force which acts at the greater distance from the fulcrum moves the system more easily because it describes a greater circle. Archimedes also finds the centre of gravity of a parallelogram, a triangle, a trapezium and finally ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... imagined more intensely interesting; nor could the most finished artist have constructed a plot more coherent in all its details, or more strictly in accordance with the rules of composition,—even to the preservation of the Aristotelian unities of time and place. So perfect, indeed, does it seem, that, were it not substantiated in every point by the records of a judicial tribunal, it might well be taken for the invention of some master of human nature and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of Xenophon is thus confirmed by that of Plato, and we are therefore justified in calling Socrates the first utilitarian; as indeed there is no side or aspect of philosophy which may not with reason be ascribed to him—he is Cynic and Cyrenaic, Platonist and Aristotelian in one. But in the Phaedo the Socratic has already passed into a more ideal point of view; and he, or rather Plato speaking in his person, expressly repudiates the notion that the exchange of a less pleasure for a greater can be an exchange ...
— Philebus • Plato
... OF COGNITION [Footnote: Read before the Aristotelian Society, December 1, 1884, and first published in Mind, vol. x (1885).—This, and the following articles have received a very slight verbal revision, consisting mostly in the omission ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... what father forsaketh the child that he hath begotten?) and Providence pre-supposing Creation: yet many of those that have seemed to excel in worldly wisdom, have gone about to disjoin this coherence; the epicure denying both Creation and Providence, but granting the world had a beginning; the Aristotelian granting Providence, but denying both the ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot |
