The phrasing comes from Will Durant’s bestselling The Story of Philosophy (1926), where he summarized Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with the line “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The popular “Quality is not an act, it is a habit” is a later corruption that swaps ‘Quality’ for Durant’s ‘Excellence.’ Aristotle never wrote these words.
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit” — Will Durant
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Provenance
The source
Work
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers
Author
Will Durant (1885–1981)
Published
1926 · Simon & Schuster · ch. on Aristotle, § “Ethics and the Nature of Happiness,” p. 87
Paraphrasing
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II.4 (and I.7)
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘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.
↑ Durant’s word was ‘Excellence’ — the popular version swaps in ‘Quality’
This is Durant’s own summary sentence, appended to a partial quotation of Aristotle. The neat aphorism is Durant’s compression, not a translation of Aristotle’s Greek.
1926 — Will Durant writes “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit” on p. 87 of The Story of Philosophy, summarizing Aristotle (UMass Boston ↗).
Over decades the sentence migrates onto quote sites credited directly to Aristotle, dropping Durant entirely (CheckYourFact ↗).
The ‘Quality’ wording credited to Aristotle today is a further corruption — visible by comparing the popular line with Durant’s original ‘Excellence.’ WIST catalogs the aphorism under Durant, not Aristotle (WIST Quotations ↗).
✓Public domain
Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy was published in 1926 and entered the U.S. public domain on 1 January 2022. The specific wording “Quality is not an act, it is a habit” is an anonymous later corruption of Durant’s line and has no separate rights holder.
Fact-check
Why everyone credits Aristotle
The line is genuinely Aristotelian in spirit — which is exactly why the misattribution sticks. But the memorable wording is a 20th-century historian’s, and the ‘Quality’ version corrupts it further.
✕
Incorrectly attributed to Aristotle
The words never appear in Aristotle’s texts. They are Will Durant’s summary in The Story of Philosophy (1926, p. 87). A Catholic University philosopher told CheckYourFact it is “a well-known misattribution — Aristotelian in spirit but not in the letter” (CheckYourFact ↗).
✕
Wording corrupted from Will Durant’s ‘Excellence’ the ‘Quality’ twist
Durant wrote “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The popular version simply swaps in ‘Quality’ — two steps removed from anything Aristotle wrote. WIST lists the line under Durant, not Aristotle (WIST ↗).
✓Bottom line: the sentence is Will Durant’s 1926 paraphrase of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and the word was ‘Excellence,’ not ‘Quality’ (UMass Boston ↗).
Context
What Aristotle actually said
Aristotle’s real point is in Nicomachean Ethics, Book II: moral virtue is not innate but formed by habit — we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. The idea is his; the crisp epigram is Durant’s.
Durant, writing to make philosophy accessible for a mass readership, compressed several sentences of Aristotle into one quotable line. It was so much tidier than the original that it eventually shed its author and attached itself to the philosopher it summarized.
Aristotle supplied the idea; Will Durant supplied the sentence.
The full Durant passage
Durant’s paragraph reads: “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; ‘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.” The embedded quotation marks are Durant’s partial rendering of Aristotle; the closing aphorism is Durant’s own.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Will Durant (1885–1981) was an American writer, historian and philosopher, author of The Story of Philosophy (1926) and co-author, with Ariel Durant, of the monumental The Story of Civilization. The Durants won the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977). His gift for distilling philosophy into memorable prose is precisely why this paraphrase of Aristotle escaped his name and drifted to the philosopher’s.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926), 87. Paraphrasing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.4.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Quality is not an act, it is a habit’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/quality-is-not-an-act-it-is-a-habit