# Aristotle ![[50 Resources/51 Attachments/51.03 Public/2025-08-22_Aristotle.jpg]] Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath (384 BC - 322 BC). Student of Plato and tutor to Alexander the Great. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Aristotle]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> <!-- SerializedQuery: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Aristotle]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> - [[A friend to all is a friend to none]] - [[A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility]] - [[Choice, not chance, determines your destiny]] - [[Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies]] - [[Hope is a waking dream]] - [[The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead]] - [[The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge]] - [[To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man]] - [[We can't learn without pain]] - [[Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god]] - [[Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit]] <!-- SerializedQuery END --> ## Commonly misattributed These circulate everywhere under his name but are not his: - [[We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit]] and [[Quality is not an act, it is a habit]] — [[Will Durant]], `The Story of Philosophy` (1926) - [[It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it]] — [[Lowell L. Bennion]], `Religion and the Pursuit of Truth` (1959) - [[Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all]] — no known source The tell: a genuine translation from ancient Greek varies between translators. These appear word for word identical everywhere because they were written in English in the twentieth century. Several of the quotes listed above are also secondhand. `Hope is a waking dream`, `Friendship is a single soul dwelling in two bodies`, and `The educated differ from the uneducated as much as the living from the dead` come from Diogenes Laërtius rather than the surviving corpus, and `Choice, not chance, determines your destiny`, `The purpose of knowledge is action, not knowledge`, and `To write well, express yourself like the common people, but think like a wise man` have no located source at all. ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Aristotle]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC -->