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Who really said it

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude

Attributed to Colin Powell 1937–2021 · four-star U.S. Army general · Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 1989–1993 · Secretary of State, 2001–2005
Printed as Powell’s own words in a 2003 book that cites his memoir by page — but that memoir page is behind a lending wall, so the wording is unconfirmed at the primary source. In copyright

This one is very probably genuine, and it comes with an unusually specific paper trail: Oren Harari’s leadership study The Powell Principles (McGraw-Hill, 2003) prints the sentence as a direct Powell quotation and footnotes it to Powell’s own memoir, My American Journey, written with Joseph E. Persico (Random House, 1995), at page 446. What we could not do is open that page. Every scanned copy of the memoir we could reach is lending-restricted, so the citation remains a very good lead rather than a confirmed reading — which is why this page says “attributed” and not “verified.”

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Unconfirmed quote & credit

“If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude” Colin Powell (1937–2021). Attributed: quoted as Powell's own words in Oren Harari's The Powell Principles (McGraw-Hill, 2003), which cites Powell's memoir My American Journey (Random House, 1995), p. 446 — a page not independently confirmed. Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico / Random House (Penguin Random House); The Powell Principles © Oren Harari / McGraw-Hill). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Colin Powell — U.S. Army general, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff & Secretary of State. Theme: "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The paper trail

Cited source
My American Journey
Authors
Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico
Publication
Random House, New York, 1995 — cited at p. 446
Quoted in
Oren Harari, The Powell Principles (McGraw-Hill, 2003)

If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude. Wording unconfirmed at source

This is the standard wording, as printed in the lesson text of The Powell Principles. The same book’s epigraph page carries a second version reading “the habit in little things.” Which of the two matches page 446 of the memoir is exactly what an unopened primary source leaves unresolved.

Colin Powell on Wikiquote

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator has no file on this line ↗ — a site search returns nothing — so there is no specialist finding to defer to, and no published reason to doubt the attribution either.
  • Wikiquote ↗ carries the sentence among Powell’s sourced quotes, filed under Oren Harari’s The Powell Principles (2003), with an editor’s note that it evokes Will Durant’s summation of Aristotle.
  • Harari’s book itself prints the line as a direct Powell quotation, in its lesson on staying vigilant about details, and footnotes it to the memoir My American Journey ↗ — the book Powell wrote with Joseph E. Persico — at page 446.
  • That page is where the trail stops. The Internet Archive’s scan of the 1995 edition ↗ is lending-restricted, and the other full-text search routes we tried were unavailable, so nobody here has read p. 446 to confirm the exact wording.
In copyright

Both books in this trail are modern and firmly in copyright: My American Journey was first published in 1995 by Random House, and The Powell Principles in 2003 by McGraw-Hill — decades past the 1931 threshold for U.S. public domain. Quoting a sentence or two for commentary and attribution is ordinary fair use; the books themselves are not free to reproduce.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

How it travels

Nobody else claims this sentence — the problem is not a rival author but a missing receipt, and a wording that has already drifted once in print.

Quote-aggregator pages No source

The line is everywhere under Powell’s name with no book, page or date attached. That is the ordinary state of a Powell quotation online, and it is why a sourced citation matters: Wikiquote ↗ is one of the few places that files it against a named book rather than floating it free.

“little things” for “little matters” Variant

The 2003 book that supplies the standard wording is not internally consistent: its lesson text reads “the habit in little matters,” while a standalone epigraph page in the same volume reads “the habit in little things.” Two wordings inside one book, before the internet had a chance to garble anything — a reminder that the memoir page itself is the wording that should settle it.

Aristotle (really Will Durant) Echo

Powell’s sentence is frequently quoted alongside — and sometimes merged with — “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit,” which is routinely printed over Aristotle’s name. Wikiquote sources that line to Will Durant ↗, The Story of Philosophy (1926), p. 87, where he was paraphrasing the Nicomachean Ethics. Powell’s line is his own formulation, not a translation of Aristotle.

Treat this as Powell’s, with a caveat you can act on: the only page-level citation anyone offers is My American Journey, p. 446, and that page sits inside a lending-restricted scan ↗. If you have a library copy, that page is where the question gets settled.

Context

Why a general cared about small things

Powell’s leadership writing keeps returning to the same unglamorous claim: that big outcomes are downstream of small habits, and that a unit which is sloppy about the trivial will be sloppy when it counts. The sentence quoted here is the compressed version of that argument — excellence framed not as a peak performance you summon on the day, but as an ambient standard you have already been practising.

The second half is the part that gets pinned to office walls. “Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude” is a claim about culture rather than individuals: it says the thing you are measuring is not how good the best day was, but what the ordinary day looks like when nobody is watching.

Excellence framed not as a peak you summon, but as the standard you have already been keeping.

Where the idea comes from

The underlying thought is far older than Powell. Wikiquote’s editors flag on his own page that the line evokes Will Durant’s famous summation of Aristotle. Durant’s sentence — “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” — appears in The Story of Philosophy (1926), where he was paraphrasing the Nicomachean Ethics for a general readership.

That older line is itself one of the internet’s most reliably mislabelled quotations, routinely printed over Aristotle’s name. Powell’s formulation is a separate sentence in a separate register — a commander’s version rather than a philosopher’s — but the two are close enough that they are often quoted in the same breath, and occasionally blurred into each other.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Work Success

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Colin Powell — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Carries the exact line among Powell's sourced quotes, filed under The Powell Principles (2003), with an editor's note that it evokes Will Durant.
Colin Powell — Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org

Biography and dates: born 5 April 1937, died 18 October 2021; Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff 1989–1993; Secretary of State 2001–2005.
My American Journey — publisher pagepenguinrandomhouse.com

The publisher's listing for the memoir the quote is cited to, credited to Colin L. Powell and Joseph E. Persico.
My American Journey (1995 scan)archive.org

The Internet Archive's scan of the 1995 edition — lending-restricted, which is why page 446 could not be checked here.
Will Durant — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Sources the older 'Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit' to Durant's The Story of Philosophy (1926), p. 87 — not to Aristotle.
Quote Investigator site searchquoteinvestigator.com

Returns nothing: the specialists have not investigated this line, so there is no anchor finding to defer to.

The soldier who wrote it down

Colin Powell

Colin Powell

1937–2021 · U.S. Army general, National Security Advisor, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff & Secretary of State

Colin Luther Powell was born in Harlem on 5 April 1937 to Jamaican immigrant parents and rose through the U.S. Army to four stars, serving as National Security Advisor from 1987 to 1989 and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993 — the youngest officer, and the first Black officer, to hold that post. He later became Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005. His 1995 memoir My American Journey, written with Joseph E. Persico, is the book that leadership writers have mined for his rules ever since; he died on 18 October 2021.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Best-available citation

Oren Harari, The Powell Principles (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003), which prints the line as Colin Powell's and cites Colin Powell with Joseph E. Persico, My American Journey (New York: Random House, 1995), 446. Quotle.info has not been able to open page 446 independently; the memoir page remains unverified.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-are-going-to-achieve-excellence-in-big-things-you/

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