Daily Inspiration Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler lands the line like a deadpan indictment of our feel-good myths about companionship. Calling friendship a "leisure activity" sounds almost insulting at first, as if friends belong on the same shelf as tennis and stamp collecting. Then he tightens the screw: it is "taxing and arduous". The wit is in the collision. Leisure is supposed to be restorative; friendship, Adler suggests, is restorative precisely because it costs something.

The intent is quietly polemical. Adler spent his career defending the idea that the best human goods require discipline, not just desire. In that context, friendship is not a mood or a convenient social accessory; it is a practice. "Taxing" hints at obligation: showing up when you'd rather disappear, listening with full attention, enduring someone's slow growth or sudden collapse. "Arduous" goes further, implying training. You have to develop patience, humility, and a tolerance for boredom and misunderstanding. The subtext is a rebuke to transactional sociability: the networking lunch, the "let's catch up" that never does, the algorithmic friend-of-a-friend that asks nothing difficult.

Adler also smuggles in a distinction between pleasure and the good life. Friendship is leisure not because it's effortless, but because it belongs to the realm of chosen ends, not imposed necessities. Work keeps you alive; friendship tests what you're alive for. Its strain is the proof that it isn't merely entertainment - it's a voluntary commitment to another person's reality, with all the inconvenient demands that entails.