Aristotle Art Quotations

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.

A good style must have an air of novelty, at the same time concealing its art.

Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning.

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile?

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility.

Excellence is not an art. It is the habit of practice.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience.

The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

But the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

All art is concerned with coming into being.

In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature.

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean.

Most men appear to think that the art of despotic government is statesmanship, and what men affirm to be unjust and inexpedient in their own case they are not ashamed of practicing towards others; they demand just rule for themselves, but where other men are concerned they care nothing about it. Such behavior is irrational; unless the one party is, and the other is not, born to serve, in which case men have a right to command, not indeed all their fellows, but only those who are intended to be subjects; just as we ought not to hunt mankind, whether for food or sacrifice . .

The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit.

All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

Everything that depends on the action of nature is by nature as good as it can be, and similarly everything that depends on art or any rational cause, and especially if it depends on the best of all causes.

Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula.

Some men turn every quality or art into a means of making money; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end all things must contribute.

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Art takes nature as its model.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible.

The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success.