"Although this well-wishing is very cool, it

does testify to an element of true disinterestedness in friendship. Third,

a friend is someone who enjoys spending time with a person, and fourth,
someone who chooses the same things. Fifth and finally, a friend is one who
shares the sorrows and joys of his friend (1166a210)."

"At a deeper level, however, Aristotle will argue that only

virtuous people can have the inner harmony and wholeness that allow one
to be most truly a friend to oneself."

"The wise man will not be torn between the seemingly noble and
the seemingly good, for he grasps with all his soul the truth that the truly
noble and the truly good are one and the same."

"When we take the virtues and vices one by one and examine them closely,
through a magnifying glass as it were, vice looks very different from moral
weakness, because the vicious seem to have no hesitations and no regrets."

"Aristotles comment on the first criterion of friendship, the

wish for and pursuit of the good of the one who is loved, puts such suicides
in their proper context. Aristotle says without qualification that everyone
wants the good for himself (1166a1920), implying that even those who
kill themselves seek a death that has come to seem best for them, either
because life has become unbearable or because, like Judas Iscariot, they
hope that by punishing their own iniquity they may in some measure redeem
themselves."

"The mind, with its faculties of

judgment and deliberation, shapes all human experience, including the
experience we have of ourselves. It is the mind that transforms sensory
data into the recognition of objects as objects and of the world as a world.
These functions of the mind are so central to us that while we can with
difficulty imagine being creatures who are devoid of emotion and are mere
dispassionate observers, it is impossible for us even to imagine being beings
that cannot perceive and think. Moreover, it is the minds continuity of
awareness through time that provides us with the sense of a self that persists
through changing experience. Without the minds memories, we would
literally not know who we are."

"But those who insist on the importance of the heart have glimpsed
an important truth. They see that if practical reasoning begins not with the
deepest concerns and longings of the soul as they actually are but, instead,
with an artificial construct of what one imagines a rational human being to
be and to care about, this reasoning is unlikely to lead to a happy life."

"That Reason which gives the good man his unity of life, and in virtue of which he is his
own constant friend, is realised not in an isolated individual but in a citizen. . . . The
self which the good man loves so constantly is not the isolated self of sense which
seeks its own good at the cost of others, but the rational self which consists in the
happy consciousness of being joined together with others in a beautiful social order. 19"