Aristotle Quotes about Children

The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.

The best way to teach morality is to make it a habit with children.

Education, Children, School

Learning is not child's play; we cannot learn without pain.

Children, Pain, Learning

Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach: not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.

Aristotle

Children, Race, Would Be

Teachers, who educate children, deserve more honour than parents, who merely gave them birth; for the latter provided mere life, while the former ensure a good life.

Aristotle

Teacher, Children, Good Life

Men must be able to engage in business and go to war, but leisure and peace are better; they must do what is necessary and indeed what is useful, but what is honorable is better. On such principles children and persons of every age which requires education should be trained.

Aristotle

Education, Children, War

Aristotle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Aristotle (Illustrated)”, p.3137, Delphi Classics

Since music has so much to do with the molding of character, it is necessary that we teach it to our children.

Aristotle

Children, Character, Teach

The rattle is a toy suited to the infant mind, and education is a rattle or toy for children of larger growth.

Aristotle

Children, Growth, Mind

Aristotle (2013). “The Essential Aristotle”, p.396, Simon and Schuster

Women who are with child should be careful of themselves; they should take exercise and have a nourishing diet. The first of these prescriptions the legislator will easily carry into effect by requiring that they should take a walk daily to some temple, where they can worship the gods who preside over birth. Their minds, however, unlike their bodies, they ought to keep quiet, for the offspring derive their natures from their mothers as plants do from earth.

Aristotle

Education, Mother, Children

Aristotle, (2016). “Aristotle's Politics: Writings from the Complete Works: Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens”, p.208, Princeton University Press

One would have thought that it was even more necessary to limit population than property; and that the limit should be fixed by calculating the chances of mortality in the children, and of sterility in married persons. The neglect of this subject, which in existing states is so common, is a never-failing cause of poverty among the citizens; and poverty is the parent of revolution and crime.

Aristotle

Children, Parent, Citizens

Aristotle, (2014). “Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume 2: The Revised Oxford Translation”, p.2008, Princeton University Press

. .we would have to say that hereditary succession is harmful. You may say the king, having sovereign power, will not in that case hand over to his children. But it is hard to believe that: it is a difficult achievement, which expects too much virtue of human nature.

Aristotle

Kings, Children, Believe

When couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.

Aristotle

Children, Couple, Law

Aristotle (2016). “Politics”, p.257, Aristotle

As to adultery, let it be held disgraceful, in general, for any man or woman to be found in any way unfaithful when they are married, and called husband and wife. If during the time of bearing children anything of the sort occur, let the guilty person be punished with a loss of privileges in proportion to the offense.

Aristotle

Children, Husband, Loss

Aristotle, Stephen Everson (1996). “Aristotle: The Politics and the Constitution of Athens”, p.192, Cambridge University Press

The life of children, as much as that of intemperate men, is wholly governed by their desires.

Aristotle

Children, Men, Desire

Aristotle (1953). “Ethics: The Nicomachean Ethics”

Nature does nothing without a purpose. In children may be observed the traces and seeds of what will one day be settled psychological habits, though psychologically a child hardly differs for the time being from an animal.

Aristotle

Nature, Children, Science

Historia Animalium VIII.I (transl. D. W. Thompson)

Since the whole city has one end, it is manifest that education should be one and the same for all, and that it should be public, and not private - not as at present, when every one looks after his own children separately, and gives them separate instruction of the sort which he thinks best; the training in things which are of common interest should be the same for all. Neither must we suppose that any one of the citizens belongs to himself, for they all belong to the state, and are each of them a part of the state, and the care of each part is inseparable from the care of the whole.

Aristotle

Education, Children, Thinking

Aristotle, Hugh Griffith (2009). “Aristotle”, p.333, Collector's Library

Hence both women and children must be educated with an eye to the constitution, if indeed it makes any difference to the virtue of a city-state that its children be virtuous, and its women too. And it must make a difference, since half the free population are women, and from children come those who participate in the constitution.

Aristotle

Children, Eye, Differences

Inasmuch as every family is a part of a state, and these relationships are the parts of a family, and the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue of the whole, women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the constitution, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of the state. And they must make a difference: for the children grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a state are women.

Aristotle

Education, Children, Growing Up

Aristotle (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Aristotle (Illustrated)”, p.2971, Delphi Classics

All are agreed that the various moral qualities are in a sense bestowed by nature: we are just, and capable of temperance, and brave, and possessed of the other virtues from the moment of our birth. But nevertheless we expect to find that true goodness is something different, and that the virtues in the true sense come to belong to us in another way. For even children and wild animals possess the natural dispositions, yet without Intelligence these may manifestly be harmful.

Aristotle

Children, Animal, Brave

Aristotle, Harris Rackham (1962). “The Nicomachean ethics”

But since there is but one aim for the entire state, it follows that education must be one and the same for all, and that the responsibility for it must be a public one, not the private affair which it now is, each man looking after his own children and teaching them privately whatever private curriculum he thinks they ought to study.

Aristotle

Children, Teaching, Responsibility

Aristotle (1987). “A New Aristotle reader”

How strange it is that Socrates, after having made the children common, should hinder lovers from carnal intercourse only, but should permit love and familiarities between father and son or between brother and brother, than which nothing can be more unseemly, since even without them love of this sort is improper. How strange, too, to forbid intercourse for no other reason than the violence of the pleasure, as though the relationship of father and son or of brothers with one another made no difference.

Aristotle

Brother, Children, Father

Aristotle, (2016). “Aristotle's Politics: Writings from the Complete Works: Politics, Economics, Constitution of Athens”, p.27, Princeton University Press

Aristotle Quotes about Children

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