Autobiography

You become what you repeatedly do

Echoes

Franklin sets out to “acquire the habitude of all these virtues” by practising them one at a time. He credits no one for the idea, and names Pythagoras only for daily examination, a different point.

1. c. 335 to 322 BCE

   “exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave.”

   Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Earliest we can find, about 2,120 years earlier.

2. 1791

   “My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg’d it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time”