“But it is better to assume principles less in number and finite, as Empedocles makes them to be. All philosophers... make principles to be contraries... (for Parmenides makes principles to be hot and cold, and these he demominates fire and earth) as those who introduce as principles the rare and the dense. But Democritus makes the principles to be the solid and the void; of which the former, he says, has the relation of being, and the latter of non”
Aristotle
10 quotes
“The science which has to do with nature clearly concerns itself for the most part with bodies and magnitudes and their properties and movements, but also with the principles of this sort of substance, as many as they may be. On the Heavens Book I, pg. 1”
“Richard McKeon (tr.) (1963), p. 150”
“Also known as Occam's razor or the principle of parsimony / economy”
“We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [all things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses”
“Knowledge of the fact differs from knowledge of the reason for the fact. I.13 , 78a.22”
“Of things said without any combination, each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a relative or where or when or being”
“Nature does not do anything in vain .”
“My lectures are published and not published; they will be intelligible to those who heard them, and to none beside. Letter to Alexander the Great as quoted by William Whewell , History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), Ch. 2, Sect. 2”
“Philosophy is the science of truth.”