8 quotations linked to Nicomachean Ethics by or associated with Aristotle, with source notes, explanations and related topics.
Virtue, choice, habit, happiness, justice, friendship, self-love, character, community and practical reasoning.
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“By doing just actions we come to be just.”
Character is formed through repeated conduct: practicing just actions helps turn justice from an abstract ideal into a stable disposition.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book II; Aristotle explains virtue as something developed through corresponding actions.
“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.
“Every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”
Actions and choices are intelligible because they pursue something taken to be good, even when people disagree about what the good actually is.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book I; the opening argument begins from the idea that action aims at a perceived good.
“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.
“Virtue then is a state apt to exercise deliberate choice, being in the relative mean, determined by reason.”
Virtue is treated as a stable capacity for deliberate choice, guided by practical judgment rather than by extremes of impulse or deficiency.
Source note: Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter VI; the public-domain English translation defines virtue through deliberate choice and the relative mean.
“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.