Will Durant

1885–1981 · American historian & philosopher

Will Durant was an American writer and historian best known for The Story of Philosophy (1926), a hugely popular survey that made academic philosophy accessible to a mass audience. With his wife Ariel he later wrote the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1968. His gift for vivid summary is exactly why so many of his paraphrases — this line, and the famous “we are what we repeatedly do… excellence is a habit” — now circulate as if Aristotle himself had written them.

Traced to source

7 quotes we’ve traced to Will Durant

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit”

Verified

“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”

Attributed

“Quality is not an act, it is a habit”

Disputed

“Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life”

Disputed

“The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”

Disputed

“The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears rather than with their minds”

Disputed

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit”

Disputed

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