Did Aristotle really say “Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god”?

The version you’ve probably seen

“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god.”

Usually credited to Aristotle. The words are Bacon’s: they open his essay “Of Friendship”, where he retells a thought from Aristotle and says no one could have put “more truth and untruth together in few words”. Aristotle’s own line, below, is about something else.

In plain words

Bacon’s point is that loneliness isn’t only about being by yourself. You can stand in a full room, see faces and hear talk, and still be alone, because without love the faces are like paintings on a wall and the talk is only noise. The “tinkling cymbal” borrows from St Paul’s line about speaking without love. Read on a lonely evening, it says the feeling is real even when you aren’t physically alone: what’s missing is closeness, not people.

Sit with this line → A few quiet exchanges about what it stirs in you.

Worth knowing

Aristotle’s Politics says that “he that is incapable of society, or so complete in himself as not to want it, makes no part of a city, as a beast or a god” (Book I, ch. 2, trans. William Ellis). He means someone who can’t live among others or has no need of them, not someone who enjoys time alone, and his wider point is that people are made to live together. Bacon agrees about the beast and disagrees about the god.

The story behind it

“Of Friendship” first appeared in 1612; Bacon rewrote it for the last edition of his Essays, in 1625, and a 1908 edition says he dedicated it to his close friend Toby Matthew. It is also where he says friendship “redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves”. He died the next year, in April 1626, of a chill caught while stuffing a fowl with snow to see whether cold would preserve it.