Poetics (4.4-4.8)

The reason is this: Learning things gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but also in the same way to all other men, though they share this pleasure only to a small degree.

The reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, that is so and so.

If we have never happened to see the original, our pleasure is not due to the representation as such but to the technique or the color or some other such cause.

Poetry then split into two kinds according to the poet’s nature. For the more serious poets represented fine doings and the doings of fine men, while those of a less exalted nature represented the actions of inferior men, at first writing satire just as the others at first wrote hymns and eulogies.