05
You become what you repeatedly do
Cites Aristotle, per a summary
Wikiquote has Durant writing “we are what we repeatedly do” and “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”, built on passages he quotes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which he credits.
- 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 2,260 years earlier.
- 1926
“‘these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions’; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”
Secondhand, from Wikiquote. Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926).
This book is still in copyright, so we read an account of it, not the book.
Sources
Wikiquote: en.wikiquote.org/