JR - pg. 289

-- Good yes, yes though the flute is not an instrument which is expressive of moral character, it is too exciting, it had not taken this particular rebuke of Aristotle's to check your Frank Woolworth's rash ambitions on the instrument. He was becomingly tone dead, and by eighteen seventy-nine had already crowned a decade of insolvency with the failure of his five-cent store in Utica, New York, where the rewards of leisure were then being advertised in the hapless passage of George Jones through McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader, last glimpsed as a poor wanderer, without money and with friends. Such are the wages of idleness. I hope every reader will, Bast God damn it keep complaining about how hard it is and then wander around the room while I 'm trying to ...

The Nicomachean Ethics - Opening

BOOK A

1

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly, every action and every intention is thought to aim at some good; hence men have expressed themselves well in declaring the good to be that at which all things aim. But there appears to be a difference among the ends; for some are activities, others are products apart from the [activities which produce them]. Whenever there are ends apart from the actions [which produce them], the products are by nature better than the corresponding activities.

Diary of a Bad Year - pg. 9

Why is it so hard to say anything about politics from outside politics? Why can there be no discourse about politics that is not itself political? To Aristotle the answer is that politics is built into human nature, that is, is part of our fate, as monarchy is the fate of bees. To strive for a systematic, supra-political discourse about politics is futile.

On Poetics - pg. 27

...this too is not the task of the poet, i.e., to speak of what has come to be, but rather to speak of what sort of things would come to be, i.e., of what is possible according to the likely or the necessary. For the historian and the poet do not differ by speaking either in meters or without meters (since it would be possible for the writings of Herodotus be put in meters, and they would no less be a history with meter than without meters). But they differ in this: the one speaks of what has come to be while the other speaks of what sort would come to be. Therefore poiesis is more philosophic and of more stature than history. For poetry speaks rather of the general things while history speaks of the particular things. The general, that it falls to a certain sort of man to say or do certain sorts of things according to the likely or the necessary, is what poetry aims at in attaching names.

On Poetics - pg. 30

Recognition [anagnorisis], on the other hand, just as the name too signifies, is a change from ignorance [agnoia] to knowledge [gnosis], whether toward friendship or enmity, of those whose relation to good or ill fortune has already been defined. A recognition is most beautiful when it comes to be at the same time as a reversal, for example as it is in the Oedipus.

On Poetics - pg. 11

The iambic meter too came about in invectives as is fitting for them, on account of which even now it is called iambic because they used to lampoon [iambizon] one another in this meter. And some of the ancients became poets of heroic meter and some of iambs. Just as Homer was also especially the poet of things of stature (for not only did he make other things well but also dramatic imitations), so also was he the first to indicate the characteristic shape of comedy, making not invective but a drama of the laughable. For Margites stands in an analogy: just as the Iliad and the Odyssey are related to tragedies so is this related to comedies.