Aristotle Quotes about Art

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.

Aristotle

Art, Practice, Causes

Aristotle (1955). “The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics”

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.

Aristotle

Art, Causes, Action

Aristotle (2016). “Pocket Aristotle”, p.170, Simon and Schuster

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

Aristotle

Art, Requirements, Impossible

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

Aristotle

Faith, Education, Art

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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

Aristotle

Art, Nature, Environment

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

Aristotle

Art, Color, Giving

Aristotle, Demetrius (of Phaleron), Thomas Hobbes, Thomas Allen Moxon (1934). “Aristotle's Poetics: Demetrius: On Style, and Selections from Aristotle's Rhetoric, Together with Hobbes' Digest and Horace's Ars Poetica”

Consider pleasures as they depart, not as they come.

Aristotle

Inspirational, Friendship, Art

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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

Aristotle

Art, States, Capacity

Aristotle (2007). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.143, Filiquarian Publishing, LLC.

Art takes nature as its model.

Aristotle

Art, Creativity, Models

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

Aristotle

Art

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.

Aristotle

Art, Long, Matter

Aristotle, Aeterna Press (2015). “Rhetoric”, p.28, Aeterna Press

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?

Aristotle

Depression, Art, Philosophy

Catholic Way Publishing, Aristotle, Plato (2015). “The Philosophy Collection [97 Books]”, p.3493, Catholic Way Publishing

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

Aristotle

Art, Artist, Giving

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

Aristotle

Art, Nature, Supplements

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle (1967). “Wit and Wisdom of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle: Being a Treasury of Thousands of Glorious, Inspiring and Imperishable Thoughts, Views and Observations of the Three Great Greek Philosophers, Classified Under about Four Hundred Subjects for Comparative Study”

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.

Aristotle

Art, Mean, Intellectual

Aristotle (1996). “The Nicomachean Ethics”, p.40, Wordsworth Editions