Furthermore, Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities, and legislators seem to be more anxious to secure it than Justice even.
The complete collection
All quotes
Filter the collection
4 quotes by Aristotle · clear filters
Hence the necessity that he should have been well trained in habits, who is to study, with any tolerable chance of profit, the principles of nobleness and justice and moral philosophy generally.
Whosoever is delighted in solitude, is either a wild beast or a god
Wrongly attributed
Sold everywhere as Aristotle's, and the thought is his — Politics I.2 argues that anyone who cannot live in society is either a beast or a god. But this English sentence is Bacon's, in Of Friendship, and he does not endorse it. He introduces it as a speech by someone unnamed that puts "more truth and untruth together in few words" than any he knows, then argues only the first half holds: a hatred of society has something of the savage beast in it, but it is "most untrue that it should have any character of the divine nature". The line is quoted as wisdom by people who have not read the sentence that follows it.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Wrongly attributed
This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.