Browse 6 quotations connecting Aristotle with Relationship, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Nicomachean Ethics, Politics: A Treatise on Government. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Nicomachean Ethics, Politics: A Treatise on Government.
“Friendship helps the young to keep from error.”
Aristotle gives friendship a practical educational role: trusted companions can help younger people avoid mistakes by supplying counsel, example and shared judgment.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter I, Project Gutenberg #8438. The sentence occurs in Aristotle’s opening inventory of why friendship is necessary across different stages of life.
“Friendship seems to be the bond of Social Communities.”
Friendship has a public dimension as well as a private one because trust and goodwill help hold communities together.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII; the discussion connects friendship with social and political association.
“A desire for Friendship may arise quickly but not Friendship itself.”
Initial liking or a wish to become friends can happen immediately, but Aristotle reserves mature friendship for a relationship tested by time, familiarity and demonstrated character.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter III, Project Gutenberg #8438. Aristotle has just argued that people must become mutually known and prove themselves fit objects of friendship before the relationship is complete.
“No one would choose to live without friends though he should have all the other good things in the world.”
Friendship is treated not as an optional luxury but as part of a flourishing life, even when material needs and other advantages are already supplied.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII; Aristotle begins his discussion of friendship by treating it as necessary to a good life.
“And so the good man ought to be Self-loving: because by doing what is noble he will have advantage himself and will do good to others.”
Aristotle distinguishes a worthy form of self-love from selfish appetite: the good person values the rational and noble part of life in a way that benefits both the self and other people.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book IX, Chapter VIII, Project Gutenberg #8438. The surrounding argument explicitly contrasts this noble “Self-loving” with the blameworthy form that grasps at wealth, honours and bodily pleasures, so the line is not a defense of simple selfishness.
“Man is naturally a political animal.”
Human beings naturally form communities in which speech, judgment, cooperation, law, and shared ideas of justice shape common life.
Source note: Politics, Book I, William Ellis translation; Aristotle argues that the city develops from natural forms of association.