"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods"
About this Quote
Aristotle lands the point with a kind of austere provocation: imagine having everything and still opting out. The shock isn’t sentimental; it’s diagnostic. “All other goods” evokes the whole shopping list of classical fortune - wealth, status, health, even pleasure - and then treats them as strangely insufficient. Friendship isn’t placed alongside those goods but above them, as the condition that makes the rest worth having.
The subtext is that humans aren’t merely consumers of benefits; we’re meaning-makers, and meaning is social. Aristotle is writing in a world where “the good life” is a public project, measured in how one lives among others, not just what one possesses. So friendship (philia) isn’t a Hallmark add-on. It’s the infrastructure of character: the people who mirror your virtues, test your judgments, and make your agency real. A life without friends is, in Aristotle’s terms, a life without a stable arena for practicing excellence. You can’t fully be brave, generous, or just in a vacuum.
The line also contains a political argument disguised as a personal one. Aristotle’s ethics and his view of the polis interlock; friendship is the emotional glue that prevents a community from degrading into mere transactions. Read that way, “no one would choose to live” is less a melodramatic claim than a warning: a society that piles up “goods” while eroding bonds is quietly undermining the very desire to keep going.
The subtext is that humans aren’t merely consumers of benefits; we’re meaning-makers, and meaning is social. Aristotle is writing in a world where “the good life” is a public project, measured in how one lives among others, not just what one possesses. So friendship (philia) isn’t a Hallmark add-on. It’s the infrastructure of character: the people who mirror your virtues, test your judgments, and make your agency real. A life without friends is, in Aristotle’s terms, a life without a stable arena for practicing excellence. You can’t fully be brave, generous, or just in a vacuum.
The line also contains a political argument disguised as a personal one. Aristotle’s ethics and his view of the polis interlock; friendship is the emotional glue that prevents a community from degrading into mere transactions. Read that way, “no one would choose to live” is less a melodramatic claim than a warning: a society that piles up “goods” while eroding bonds is quietly undermining the very desire to keep going.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
|---|---|
| Source | Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII (Bekker 1155a5). Often translated: "Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." |
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