In the chapter on evaluating the plausibility of claims in The Pocket Guide to Critical Thinking, Epstein warns "Every rumor, all the gossip you hear, compare it to what you know about the person or situation. Don't repeat it." Sound advice, especially when facing the open-air bazaar of semi-fact that is the internet. Case in point: many popular quotations attributed to Aristotle are not from Aristotle. For example,
Anyone who has actually read Aristotle will recognize this is not his style. And it isn't. The words were written by Will Durant, in his 1926 popular digest, The Story of Philosophy (p. 61). The crib has even been scrubbed of the original's quote from Aristotle."Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit."
Likewise, "No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness" is also misattributed to Aristotle, when it is a paraphrase by Seneca of a passage from the pseudo-Aristotelian compilation the Problemata.
"Hope is a waking dream"? Also not from Aristotle. It's from the Wikipedia of antiquity, Diogenes Laertius.
Finally, the very fortune-cookieish "where your talents and the needs of the world cross lies your calling" does not sound even remotely Aristotelian, but I have not been able to trace it to any source before the internet age. (Nor anywhere in Aristotle, of course.)
Comments
in Portuguese and Russian - only because of that I found that two versions are so different so I need to check original. What a surprise! Anonymous created it.. or few of them each one in each language. Thank you very much! Now my soul is calm!.. :) Abraço!
Благодарю!