Did Aristotle Say "We Are What We Repeatedly Do"?
By No, he did not write it. Will Durant did, in 1926.
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit" appears in The Story of Philosophy, Durant’s one-volume popular history, in the chapter on Aristotle. He was compressing an argument from the Nicomachean Ethics into a sentence a general reader would remember, and he succeeded so completely that the sentence outran both the book it summarized and the book it appeared in.
It is probably the most quoted thing Aristotle never wrote.
Why this one is different
Most misattributions are wrong twice: wrong about who said it, and wrong about what that person thought. "What we do in life echoes in eternity" is credited to Marcus Aurelius, who spent a good deal of the Meditations arguing the reverse.
This one is not like that. Durant’s sentence is a fair and compact statement of what Aristotle actually argues. Strip the attribution error away and the philosophy underneath survives intact.
That is exactly why it has proved so durable. There is no jarring note, nothing that makes a reader stop and think this does not sound like him. It sounds like him because it is a good summary of him, written by someone who had read the book carefully and was trying to be accurate rather than quotable.
What Aristotle actually wrote
The argument sits in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, and it opens by denying that virtue is something you can be taught in the way you are taught a fact.
Aristotle’s claim is that we acquire the virtues the way we acquire crafts. You become a builder by building and a harpist by playing the harp. In the same way, he says, we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, and brave by doing brave acts. The disposition is the residue of the actions, not their source.
He is also blunt about what follows from this. If character is built by repetition, then it matters enormously what you repeat, and it matters from a young age, before anyone is in a position to choose. He says the difference is not small. It is everything.
What Durant did was take several pages of that and hand back one line. The compression is lossy, as all compression is, but it does not distort.
So what is the correction worth?
Two things, and neither is pedantry.
The first is that Durant said so himself. He was not passing his own words off as Aristotle’s; he was writing a summary in a book that is openly a summary. The error entered later, when the sentence was lifted out of a chapter about Aristotle and quietly relabeled as being by Aristotle. Nobody lied. A citation simply fell off in transit, which is how nearly all of this happens.
The second is more useful. Anyone moved enough by the sentence to want it on a wall would get considerably more from the passage it came from. Durant gives you the conclusion. Aristotle gives you the argument, including the uncomfortable parts, like the claim that you are already substantially the product of habits formed before you had any say in them, and that changing them is slow work performed against a current.
The quotable version implies that excellence is available to anyone who decides on it. The original is clear that it is available to anyone who does it, repeatedly, for a long time, which is a different and less flattering promise.
Why this is on a Stoic site
Aristotle was not a Stoic, and the Stoics disagreed with him about a great deal, particularly about whether external goods are needed for a flourishing life. He thought some were. They insisted none were.
But on habituation they are close to unanimous, and the Stoics arguably pressed it harder. Epictetus is relentless on the point that philosophy is a practice rather than a subject, and that a student who can expound a doctrine but has not drilled it has not learned it. His term for the training is askēsis. Seneca makes the same complaint from the other direction, that people learn philosophy the way they learn a lecture and then live exactly as before.
Which is to say the idea in the misquote is genuinely part of the tradition. It just did not enter it through that sentence.
What to read instead
Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, is short and readable and contains the whole argument. Any reputable translation will do; this is not a text where the standard English version is a Victorian relic, as it is with the Meditations, where the translation you pick genuinely matters.
Durant is worth reading too, on his own terms rather than as a source of quotations. The Story of Philosophy is a hundred years old and shows it in places, but it is an unusually good popular history and the Aristotle chapter is one of its better ones.
For the Stoic version of the same argument, Epictetus is the place to start, and which of his books to read first is a real question with a real answer.
This entry is one of twenty-five on our list of misattributed Stoic quotes, which came out of auditing our own quote library and finding fifty-five passages that were not what they claimed to be.
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