The Complete Aristotle (eng.)

account of the changes that may befall them, and because we have
assumed happiness to be something permanent and by no means easily
changed, while a single man may suffer many turns of fortune’s
wheel. For clearly if we were to keep pace with his fortunes, we
should often call the same man happy and again wretched, making the
happy man out to be chameleon and insecurely based. Or is this
keeping pace with his fortunes quite wrong? Success or failure in
life does not depend on these, but human life, as we said, needs
these as mere additions, while virtuous activities or their
opposites are what constitute happiness or the reverse.
    The question we have now discussed confirms our definition. For
no function of man has so much permanence as virtuous activities
(these are thought to be more durable even than knowledge of the
sciences), and of these themselves the most valuable are more
durable because those who are happy spend their life most readily
and most continuously in these; for this seems to be the reason why
we do not forget them. The attribute in question, then, will belong
to the happy man, and he will be happy throughout his life; for
always, or by preference to everything else, he will be engaged in
virtuous action and contemplation, and he will bear the chances of
life most nobly and altogether decorously, if he is ‘truly good’
and ‘foursquare beyond reproach’.
    Now many events happen by chance, and events differing in
importance; small pieces of good fortune or of its opposite clearly
do not weigh down the scales of life one way or the other, but a
multitude of great events if they turn out well will make life
happier (for not only are they themselves such as to add beauty to
life, but the way a man deals with them may be noble and good),
while if they turn out ill they crush and maim happiness; for they
both bring pain with them and hinder many activities. Yet even in
these nobility shines through, when a man bears with resignation
many great misfortunes, not through insensibility to pain but
through nobility and greatness of soul.
    If activities are, as we said, what gives life its character, no
happy man can become miserable; for he will never do the acts that
are hateful and mean. For the man who is truly good and wise, we
think, bears all the chances life becomingly and always makes the
best of circumstances, as a good general makes the best military
use of the army at his command and a good shoemaker makes the best
shoes out of the hides that are given him; and so with all other
craftsmen. And if this is the case, the happy man can never become
miserable; though he will not reach blessedness, if he meet with
fortunes like those of Priam.
    Nor, again, is he many-coloured and changeable; for neither will
he be moved from his happy state easily or by any ordinary
misadventures, but only by many great ones, nor, if he has had many
great misadventures, will he recover his happiness in a short time,
but if at all, only in a long and complete one in which he has
attained many splendid successes.
    When then should we not say that he is happy who is active in
accordance with complete virtue and is sufficiently equipped with
external goods, not for some chance period but throughout a
complete life? Or must we add ‘and who is destined to live thus and
die as befits his life’? Certainly the future is obscure to us,
while happiness, we claim, is an end and something in every way
final. If so, we shall call happy those among living men in whom
these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—but happy men. So
much for these questions.
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11
    That the fortunes of descendants and of all a man’s friends
should not affect his happiness at all seems a very unfriendly
doctrine, and one opposed to the opinions men hold; but since the
events that happen are numerous and admit of all sorts of
difference, and some come more near to us and others less so, it
seems a long—nay, an infinite—task to discuss each in detail; a
general outline will perhaps suffice. If, then, as some of a man’s
own misadventures have a certain weight and influence on life while
others are, as it were, lighter, so too there are differences among
the misadventures of our friends taken as a whole, and it makes a
difference whether the various suffering befall the living or the
dead (much more even than whether lawless and terrible deeds are
presupposed in a tragedy or done on the stage), this