Excellence is not an act, it’s a habit.
- Aristotle ?
Apparently, Aristotle did not say this or many of the variations often attributed to him.
Here’s what he actually said:
Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit… we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a
And:
Excellence (aretē), then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence owes its birth and growth to teaching… while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit.
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 1103a14-17
Later, in 1926, Will Durant attempted to summarise Aristotle’s ideas in his book, The Story of Philosophy.
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
The last line is the one mistakenly attribute to Aristotle.
Yet what Aristotle actually said, in effect, was that moral excellence is a habit.