Aristotle Famous Quotes

There is a famous painting, Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper. I am in love with that painting. Sometimes, I think everyone is like the people in that painting, everyone lost in their own private universes of pain or sorrow or guilt, everyone remote and unknowable. The painting reminds me of you. It breaks my heart.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, "The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language." What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant!

Aristotle was famous for knowing everything. He taught that the brain exists merely to cool the blood and is not involved in the process of thinking. This is true only of certain persons.

The trouble with Goodreads is that they never authenticate these quotations of famous people.

I also knew I had inherited the name of the world's most famous philosopher. I hated that. Everyone expected something from me. Something I just couldn't give. So I renamed myself Ari. If I switched the letter, my name was Air. I thought it might be a great thing to be the air. I could be something and nothing at the same time. I could be necessary and also invisible. Everyone would need me and no one would be able to see me.

A famous philosopher (either Aristotle or Judith Krantz, I forget who) once said about being a woman in Los Angeles: If you're blonde and beautiful, you're interchangeable. If you're not, you're invisible.

Aristotle famously suggested that through the mirror of friendship, people are able to see themselves in ways that are otherwise inaccessible

Aristotle famously suggested that through the mirror of friendship, people are able to see themselves in ways that are otherwise inaccessible.

Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: Did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, 'The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.' What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason--for then we would know the mind of God.

Aristotle was no experimenter, and he relied too much on his preconceptions. Famously, Aristotle once proclaimed that women have fewer teeth than men. Because no one thought to check this proclamation of Aristotle, for a thousand years everyone believed that women have fewer teeth (women and men, of course, actually have the same number of teeth).

Smith echoes the famous appeal of W.E.B. Du Bois to the human bond in books that ignores the veil of racial prejudice: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil.64 Committed to a goal (Truth) beyond what mere social life might offer, Du Bois finds in books a human community open to him in a way that his local human communities are not, riven as they are by segregation and hatred. Instead, on the basis of common humanity and common concern for truth, the dead authors welcome Du Bois into their company.

Even in ancient times general recognition must have been accorded to the view which later in the shape of the maxim pecunia pecuniam parere non potest was to be the basis of all discussion of the problem of interest for hundreds and even thousands of years, and Aristotle undoubtedly did not state it in the famous passage in his Politics as a new doctrine but as a generally-accepted commonplace.2

In Aristotle’s famous Ethics, he uses the analogy of a warped piece of wood to describe human nature. In order to eliminate warping or curvature, a skilled woodworker slowly applies pressure in the opposite direction—essentially, bending it straight. Of course, a couple of thousand years later Kant snorted, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing can be made straight.” We might not ever be straight, but we can strive for straighter.

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of inventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well. So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind of dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something- the unconscious. We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of reality he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories...But what role DOES the unconscious play?...either the unconscious knows about other realities, or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter.

One of the most famous parts of Bacon's philosophy is his enumeration of what he calls 'idols', by which he means bad habits of mind that cause people to fall into error. Of these he enumerates four kinds. 'Idols of the tribe' are those that are inherent in human nature; he mentions in particular the habit of expecting more order in natural phenomena than is actually to be found. 'Idols of the cave' are personal prejudices, characteristic of the particular investigator. 'Idols of the market-place' are those that have to do with the tyranny of words. 'Idols of the theatre' are those that have to do with received systems of thought; of these, naturally, Aristotle and the scholastics afforded him the most noteworthy instances. Although

A prime example of this is a Vatican fresco by Raphael, the Italian artist who was Leonardo’s young follower. His School of Athens, painted around the time that Leonardo was turning sixty, depicts two dozen ancient philosophers standing in discourse. At the center is Plato, striding alongside Aristotle (fig. 120). Raphael used his contemporaries as models for most of the philosophers, and Plato looks to be a depiction of Leonardo. He wears a rose-colored toga, matching the colorful tunics that Leonardo famously sported. As in the Melzi portrait and others of Leonardo, Plato is balding, with wisps of curly hair on top and curls flowing in waves from the side of his head to his shoulder. There is also the curly beard, coming down to the top of his chest. And he is making a gesture characteristic of Leonardo: his right index finger is pointing up to the heavens.

Even if there is only one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him? Up to now, most scientists have been too occupied with the development of new theories that describe what the universe is to ask the question why. On the other hand, the people whose business it is to ask why, the philosophers, have not been able to keep up with the advance of scientific theories. In the eighteenth century, philosophers considered the whole of human knowledge, including science, to be their field and discussed questions such as: did the universe have a beginning? However, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and mathematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers reduced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philosopher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language.” What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to Kant! However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, philosophers, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.

Despite his earthbound approach and his preoccupation with scientific fact, Aristotle had an acute understanding of the nature and importance of religion and mythology. He pointed out that people who had become initiates in the various mystery religions were not required to learn any facts “but to experience certain emotions and to be put in a certain disposition.”35 Hence his famous literary theory that tragedy effected a purification (katharsis) of the emotions of terror and pity that amounted to an experience of rebirth. The Greek tragedies, which originally formed part of a religious festival, did not necessarily present a factual account of historical events but were attempting to reveal a more serious truth. Indeed, history was more trivial than poetry and myth: “The one describes what has happened, the other what might. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and serious than history; for poetry speaks of what is universal, history of what is particular.”36 There may or may not have been a historical Achilles or Oedipus, but the facts of their lives were irrelevant to the characters we have experienced in Homer and Sophocles, which express a different but more profound truth about the human condition. Aristotle’s account of the katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle’s statement are alive and well. Christian philosopher Lee Hardy and many others have argued that this “Greek attitude toward work and its place in human life was largely preserved in both the thought and practice of the Christian church” through the centuries, and still holds a great deal of influence today in our culture.43 What has come down to us is a set of pervasive ideas. One is that work is a necessary evil. The only good work, in this view, is work that helps make us money so that we can support our families and pay others to do menial work. Second, we believe that lower-status or lower-paying work is an assault on our dignity. One result of this belief is that many people take jobs that they are not suited for at all, choosing to aim for careers that do not fit their gifts but promise higher wages and prestige. Western societies are increasingly divided between the highly remunerated “knowledge classes” and the more poorly remunerated “service sector,” and most of us accept and perpetuate the value judgments that attach to these categories. Another result is that many people will choose to be unemployed rather than do work that they feel is beneath them, and most service and manual labor falls into this category. Often people who have made it into the knowledge classes show great disdain for the concierges, handymen, dry cleaners, cooks, gardeners, and others who hold service jobs.

Switzerland is the closest to what Aristotle, Plato and Socrates had in mind when democracy was conceived. Americans proudly recite Lincoln’s famous democratic battle cry: ‘Government for the people, by the people and of the people, - but in fact this is a better description of the Swiss model.

And this was more than mere relocation. In effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital – the city of Plato and Aristotle – where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations.

withal vain-glorious, proud and inconstant. He whose arms are very short in respect to the stature of his body, is thereby signified to be a man of high and gallant spirit, of a graceful temper, bold and warlike. He whose arms are full of bones, sinews and flesh, is a great desirer of novelties and beauties, and one that is very credulous and apt to believe anything. He whose arms are very hairy, whether they be lean or fat, is for the most part a luxurious person, weak in body and mind, very suspicious and malicious withal. He whose arms have no hair on them at all, is of a weak judgment, very angry, vain, wanton, credulous, easily deceived himself, yet a great deceiver of others, no fighter, and very apt to betray his dearest friends. CHAPTER IV Of Palmistry, showing the various Judgments drawn from the Hand. Being engaged in this fourth part to show what judgment may be drawn, according to physiognomy, from the several parts of the body, and coming in order to speak of the hands, it has put me under the necessity of saying something about palmistry, which is a judgment made of the conditions, inclinations, and fortunes of men and women, from the various lines and characters nature has imprinted in their hands, which are almost as serious as the hands that have them. The reader should remember that one of the lines of the hand, and which indeed is reckoned the principal, is called the line of life; this line encloses the thumb, separating it from the hollow of the hand. The next to it, which is called the natural line, takes its

uncaused cause, or to use Aristotle’s famous expression, an Unmoved

For most of recorded Western history, there have been two competing views of the shape of history. The first is inherited from the Ancient Greeks, reaching its most famous form in Polybius (200 BC–118 BC): the idea that civilisations rise and fall in cycles like the seasons. The Anacyclosis was developed from Plato (428 BC–348 BC) and Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) but finalised by Polybius in The Histories.[18] It held that there are three types of governmental constitutions—monarchy, aristocracy, democracy—which each degenerate into a tyrannous form before giving way to the next in sequence as pictured below.

Steeped in the Latin of Roman law, Europe’s jurists branded this agreement the pactum societatis. In their minds, it marked the birth of legitimate government. A couple of centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau gave it a more famous name: the social contract. It’s not based on a signed piece of paper or original physical act. Like the axis of Galileo’s rotating earth, the social contract is imaginary, but it is still there, exerting its influence and power. Like any contract, it imposes obligations both on me and on my rulers.

The eighteenth century is famously the age of wigs and salons, of wits and philosophes, of experimental science and the first turning of the wheels of the Industrial Revolution—and the transatlantic slave trade. In England, the era dubbed itself the Augustan Age. On the other side of Europe, Immanuel Kant coined another term: the Age of Enlightenment. They might just as well have called it the Age of Locke. No thinker since Socrates dominated the minds of his immediate successors as John Locke did. His ideas were the flammable fuel of the Enlightenment, and sent it soaring to new intellectual heights.

Leonardo da Vinci. His voluminous notebooks reveal his peculiar fascination with observation and invention. This is his Aristotelian side. But his famous etching of Vitruvian Man reveals his more mystical, Platonic side.

Across the English Channel, the biggest champion of the new mechanical worldview was René Descartes. Bacon was entirely ignorant of mathematics. Descartes was steeped in it. Reducing the operations of the universe to a series of lines, circles, numbers, and equations suited his reclusive personality. His most famous saying, “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum), could be stated less succinctly but more accurately as “Because we are the only beings who do math, we rule.

Anselm said I must believe so that I can understand. Abelard now reversed the formula: I must understand so that I can believe. Faith without reason was merely supposition, an opinion or guesstimate (aestimatio). Abelard’s most famous work, Sic et Non, compared 150 passages from Scripture and the Church Fathers that contradicted one another. The only way to sort out the mess, Abelard was saying, was through reason and logic. The only way Christianity could make itself a believable faith was by responding to our natural inclination to question its foundations.

how shall I put it?—of less than virtuous loves. . . . Gradually this second book took shape in my mind as it had to be. I could tell you almost all of it, without reading the pages that were meant to poison me. Comedy is born from the komai—that is, from the peasant villages—as a joyous celebration after a meal or a feast. Comedy does not tell of famous and powerful men, but of base and ridiculous creatures, though not wicked; and it does not end with the death of the protagonists. It achieves the effect of the ridiculous by showing the defects and vices of ordinary men. Here Aristotle sees the tendency to laughter as a force for good, which can also have an instructive value: through witty riddles and unexpected metaphors, though it tells us things differently from the way they are, as if it were lying, it actually obliges us to examine them more closely, and it makes us say: Ah, this is just how things are, and I didn’t know it. Truth reached by depicting men and the world as worse than they are or than we believe them to be, worse in any case than the epics, the tragedies, lives of the saints have shown them to us. Is that it?

In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” What is interesting about this sentence is that “these truths” are anything but self-evident. They would have been regarded as subversive by Plato, who held that humanity is divided into people of gold, silver and bronze and that hierarchy is written into the structure of society.[7] They would have been incomprehensible to Aristotle who believed that some were born to rule and others to be ruled.[8] They are “self-evident” only to one steeped in the Bible.

The famous philosopher Aristotle once said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

Descartes’s worldview makes us spiders at the center of an enormous web not of our making. Or in his other famous formulation, we are the ghosts in the machine: souls in a world machine that operates inexorably and impersonally according to the laws of geometry and mechanics, while we operate the levers and spin the dials.

The truth was that Newton’s biblical research was central to his entire scientific career. They form the essential backdrop for his most famous work, the Principia Mathematica.

Newton’s own goal was to demonstrate the dependence of matter on God.10 He did this through his revolutionary concept of force. Nature as described in the Principia is a complex matrix of forces, from centripetal and centrifugal force, to magnetic force and inertial force (as in, “Bodies at rest tend to remain at rest”), to the most famous of all, the force of gravity. These forces, Newton showed, exert a palpable and mathematically predictable influence on the behavior of all physical bodies. Yet they are entirely invisible and beyond any purely physical or mechanical explanation.

Pope John XXII, of course, had read “Feed my sheep” very differently. Like Boniface, he saw it as enshrining papal authority over the sheep of secular society, including its secular rulers. So William of Ockham proceeded to take his famous razor to Boniface’s arguments. The pope had no such plenitude of power, Ockham replied; the faithful are neither sheep nor slaves. Nor are there two swords, as Boniface had claimed. There is only one, the one that kings and magistrates use to govern and protect their subjects. In fact, Christ had specifically forbidden his apostles from exercising the same kind of authority over the faithful that kings exercised over subjects (Matthew 20:25–27).20 By claiming broad authority, as Boniface had done, popes had in effect turned their office into an illegitimate enterprise.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive.

His first breach with the Church did not come with his famous Ninety-five Theses, which he posted on the Wittenberg church door on October 31, 1517. It came almost two months earlier, on September 4, when he published another set of theses, Disputation Against Scholastic Theology, which are less well-known but nearly as explosive. They asserted that a Christianity founded on the spiritual power of God’s grace—in effect Christianity in its Platonized form as received from Saint Augustine—and the view of law and nature derived from Aristotle could never be reconciled. “The whole Aristotelian ethic,” Luther wrote, “is grace’s worst enemy.” And so as the tidal wave of Reformation overwhelmed the heart of Europe and changed its religious and cultural contours forever, it also swept Aristotle almost out of sight.

Aquinas and his followers could help, and did. In a pristine “state of nature,” they decided, man was totally free but totally unsafe. He was prey not only to the elements and wild animals, but to his fellow man, for whom freedom was license to act not as zoon politikon, but as homo lupus. In Thomas Hobbes’s famous formulation, life ends up being “nasty, brutish, and short.” To correct this, right reason dictates a solution. To avoid killing one another off, men make an agreement. They trade in their natural rights in exchange for civil rights, which are now recognized and protected by the community and those who wield authority in its name.

Far from being a distraction from holy things, as St. Bernard had claimed, this earthly order is their complement. The fact that man has two aspects, the material and the spiritual, does not mean conflict or compromise: “Grace does not replace nature, it perfects nature.” It’s Aquinas’s most famous aphorism, and it simply means we can merge the two halves of ourselves into a single higher whole—just as Thomas Aquinas had merged Aristotle and Christianity into a single system.

Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.” He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries

Aristotle was the figure who dominated every part of the university curriculum, from Salerno and Toledo to Paris and Oxford and Louvain, from the seven liberal arts to medicine, law, and especially theology. Aristotle was, in the Arab phrase made famous by the poet Dante, “the Master of Those Who Know.” He was also the supreme teacher of all those who wanted to know. The standard way to learn any subject was first to read Aristotle’s own works on it line by line from cover to cover, then pore over the commentaries on the work by Boethius, Duns Scotus, Peter Lombard, and Thomas Aquinas (whose works were rehabilitated when he was canonized in 1323). Finally, the student would write up his own series of quaestiones, or logical debating points, that seemed to arise from the text, and which were themselves reflections on past scholars’ debates on Aristotle.

By a mental sleight of hand, Ficino effortlessly merged Plato’s theory of love with Christian Neoplatonist ideas about divine love derived from familiar authors like Augustine or Saint Bernard—not to mention Italy’s two most famous love poets, Dante and Petrarch. And Plato’s doctrine of love as the desire for beauty had a peculiar attraction in quattrocento Florence.

If Aristotle could be wrong in one thing, he might in others,

In a purely technical sense, Sens Cathedral is probably the first Gothic church. When Abelard and Bernard met there in the spring of 1140, they probably did not notice that an architectural revolution was taking place over their heads. Its builders pioneered many of the characteristic elements of the Gothic style, from ribbed interior vaults and a three-part elevation, to the famous pointed Gothic arch for its windows.

The man most active in bringing together these twin forces for divine order and proportion was Abbot Suger, head of the famous abbey of Saint Denis near Paris.

As for Chartres’s famous flying buttresses, the first ever constructed, they were built to relieve stress on the cathedral’s walls, so that windows could be available for yards and yards of glittering stained glass.

The Academy’s most famous dropout was raised in Macedonia, the Texas of ancient Greece.

creation, we see the conscious, ordering mind of God.23 What God has put into the world, a preordained mathematical order, we can trace back to God through that same order. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing of the man standing in the square and circle, divine geometric proportion turns out to be written into every feature of our lives and is only waiting to be revealed like a crucial message inscribed in invisible ink. Thanks to Pythagoras’s mystical math, Socrates’s cave suddenly comes alive in the divine order and meaning.

He experimented with pulleys, by which he demonstrated his famous leverage principle, “that with any given force it was possible to lift any given weight.” This enabled him to stage one of his most famous coups de théâtre in front of King Hiero and the entire city of Syracuse. Archimedes tied a series of pulleys to a dry-docked three-masted ship loaded with cargo and passengers, and then, to the crowd’s stunned amazement, he lifted it into the harbor by himself. This led Hiero to declare, “From this day forward, Archimedes is believed no matter what he says,” which led Archimedes to reply in the full flush of triumph, “Give me a lever and a place to stand, and I shall move the earth.

All the same, it is the “hard” side of Stoicism that dominated the life and work of its most famous Roman exponent, the philosopher Seneca (4 BCE–65 CE). Seneca’s wise man is indifferent to pain and suffering; he has no fears and no hopes. He never gets angry, even when he sees his father killed and his mother raped.15 Seneca believed in humane virtues like gratitude and clemency, including toward slaves, and writes eloquently about their lasting benefit to others. In the end, however, Seneca loved humanity more than he cared for human beings.

Aristotle famously said, “The more you know, the more you know you don’t know,

Aristotle famously argued, for example, that one grandiose virtuous action does not make a person virtuous; we become virtuous by practicing virtue on an everyday basis.

Heraclitus is supposed to have said, while his most famous sayings of all, “All things change” (Panta rhei) and “You cannot step into the same river twice,” make him the father of relativism:

She was Jackie Kennedy, the most famous woman in the world,” noted Stanley Levin, “and that was worth all the money in the world to a man like Aristotle Onassis. He felt she’d legitimize him in the eyes of the world. I also believe that, deep down, he loved her in his own way and wanted to help her. His heart went out to her. She had that effect on people. He had Maria Callas on the side. Jackie accepted it. She knew the terms of their arrangement from the very beginning.” In years to come, there would be many published accounts about the Onassises’ sex life, which was always reported as being very robust. Onassis often bragged about their lovemaking, but it was all for show to boost his image. Some of his employees from that time now admit he actually paid them to spread these sorts of rumors in the tabloids.