Aristotle Quotes About Children

• Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children because they are more certain they are their own.

  Aristotle

  Family, Mothers Day, Mom

• Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

  Aristotle

  Leadership, Education, Teacher

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

  Aristotle

  Children, Pain, Learning

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

  Aristotle

  Education, Children, School

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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”

• 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

• 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)

• 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”

• 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

• . .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

• 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

• 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

• 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”

• 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

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