"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 | Verified source: Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle, -325)
Evidence: For without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods; (Book VIII, Chapter 1 (Bekker 1155a3–5)). This line is from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics at the opening of the treatise on friendship (Book VIII). The wording you gave is a standard English translation (commonly associated with W. D. Ross’s translation tradition). Aristotle’s original work is ancient (4th century BCE) and was not “first published” in the modern sense; it circulated as texts/lecture material and survives via manuscript tradition. The standard scholarly way to verify the exact location across editions/translations is the Bekker numbering: 1155a3–5. The quote is therefore correctly attributed to Aristotle, but the *exact English wording* depends on the translator/edition. Supporting locations/translations showing essentially the same sentence appear in multiple public-domain or academic reproductions of Book VIII, ch. 1 (e.g., Ross-based text at Wikisource; other translator renderings listed in WIST). Other candidates (1) Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Paul Rabinow, 1996) compilation95.0% ... Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics . In Book 8 , Aristotle writes : " Friendship is a virtue most necessary with a vi... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Aristotle. (2026, February 8). Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/without-friends-no-one-would-choose-to-live-29266/
Chicago Style
Aristotle. "Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." FixQuotes. February 8, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/without-friends-no-one-would-choose-to-live-29266/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods." FixQuotes, 8 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/without-friends-no-one-would-choose-to-live-29266/. Accessed 13 Feb. 2026.
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