Aristoteles, writing his book Nicomachean  Ethics, focuses his study on happiness, virtue and friendship.
About happiness says in his book I in Nicomachean ethics: "Simply call perfect what we always choose by itself and never for anything else, it seems to be, especially the happiness, we chose it for itself and never for anything else "
In his book About the Soul, Aristotle explains that the soul is the perfection of the body, and that the soul has functions such as the locomotive, the reproductive, the nutritive. Happiness represents for the soul, according to Aristoteles, a state of optimization of his faculties. Happiness is what the soul is inclined, by its own constitution.
Continues and teaches in book I, in Nicomachean Ethics: "the good of man is an activity of the soul according to the virtue" and says about virtue: "happiness is a certain activity of the soul according to virtue" .
Thomas Aquinas also expresses: "Everyone desire happiness."
Virtue is defined as the intermediate term between the excess and the defect, as a natural dispositions of the soul.
He gives example in the Magna Moralia, cap XXII: "liberality is the medium between prodigality and avarice, two passions that have as their object money"; "Temperance occupies the middle between disarray and insensibility in the point of pleasure". Cap XX; "magnificence is the medium between ostentation and pettiness" cap XXIV.
So Aristotle defines some virtues that are later called cardinal virtues because they give rise to the others: justice, prudence, temperance and fortitude.
Aristoteles, in one of his last books, Rhetoric, clarifies that although the end of virtue is happiness. Virtue is one of the parts of happiness, that is, happiness needs other things besides virtue, happiness requires for Aristotle: nobility, good friends, old age, health, beauty, strength, size, ability to fight, fame, honor, good luck, virtue.
In other words, what is commonly known as "values". Virtue would be a value, but not the only one.