Greek philosopher (384 B.C. - 322 B.C.)
A statement is persuasive and credible either because it is directly self-evident or because it appears to be proved from other statements that are so. In either case it is persuasive because there is somebody whom it persuades.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
He then alone will strictly be called brave who is fearless of a noble death, and of all such chances as come upon us with sudden death in their train.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
But tangible differ from visible and sonorous impressions, in that the latter are perceived by the medium acting in some way upon us, while the former are perceived, not by, but together with, the medium, like a man who is struck through his shield--for it is not the shield which, having been struck, strikes him, but the shield and he are simultaneously struck together.
ARISTOTLE
On the Vital Principle
The law is reason unaffected by desire.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representation of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Money ... is founded merely on convention; its currency and value depending on the mutable wills of men.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Wicked men obey for fear, but the good for love.
ARISTOTLE
attributed, Day's Collacon
Comedy is, as we have said, an imitation of characters of a lower type--not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality--namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
If there is some end of the things we do, which we desire for its own sake, clearly this must be the good. Will not knowledge of it, then, have a great influence on life? Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what we should? If so, we must try, in outline at least, to determine what it is.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
It is easy to have some knowledge about honey, wine, and hellebore, of cautery and the use of the knife; but how they should be applied for restoring health, to whom and when, is no less a matter than to be a physician.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
A family, to be complete, must consist of freemen and slaves; and as every complex object naturally resolves itself into simple elements, we must consider the elements of a family--the master and servant, the husband and wife, the father and children; what all of these are in themselves, and what are the relations which they naturally and properly bear to each other.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
The necessity of perpetuating the species, forms the combining principle between males and females; a principle independent of choice or design, and alike incident to animals and to plants, which are all naturally impelled to propagate their respective kinds.
ARISTOTLE
Politics
Now all orators effect their demonstrative proofs by allegation either of enthymems or examples, and, besides these, in no other way whatever.
ARISTOTLE
Rhetoric
To those who cite the disreputable sorts of pleasure one may fairly reply that these are not really pleasant. For we ought not, because they are pleasant to the wrongly disposed, to think they are generally pleasant, or to any but these; just as things that are wholesome or sweet or bitter to the sick, are not so to all, and as things are not really white that seem so to those suffering from opthalmia.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point of diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these respects, yet has a plot and artistically constructed incidents.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics
A man who has been well trained will not in any case look for more accuracy than the nature of the matter allows; for to expect exact demonstration from a rhetorician is as absurd as to accept from a mathematician a statement only probable.
ARISTOTLE
Nicomachean Ethics
Since the objects of imitation are men in action, and these men must be either of a higher or a lower type (for moral character mainly answers to these divisions, goodness and badness being the distinguishing marks of moral differences), it follows that we must represent men either as better than in real life, or as worse, or as they are.
ARISTOTLE
Poetics