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Who really said it

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

Written by Will Durant 1885–1981 · American historian & popular philosopher
Verified Free to reuse

This line really is Durant’s. It appears in his 1926 bestseller The Story of Philosophy, where he is summarizing Aristotle’s ethics—so the crediting to Durant is correct, even though the internet overwhelmingly pins it on Aristotle. Durant’s printed sentence reads “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit”; the viral form simply drops the word “then.”

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit” Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926) — summarizing Aristotle. Often misattributed to Aristotle himself.

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In context

Evoking the world of Will Durant — American historian & philosopher · Pulitzer Prize (1968). Theme: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit". 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.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit". 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 source

Work
The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers
Author
Will Durant
First published
1926 (Simon & Schuster) · ch. on Aristotle, “Ethics and the Nature of Happiness”
Status
Durant’s own summary of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Bk. II.4, Bk. 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, summarizing Aristotle

The words in single quotes are Durant quoting Aristotle directly; the rest — including the famous closing sentence — is Durant’s own paraphrase knitting Aristotle’s argument together.

Read The Story of Philosophy (Garden City reprint of the 1926 text) at the Internet Archive

How we traced it

  • Wikiquote’s sourced Will Durant page prints the full passage and attributes it to The Story of Philosophy (1926), footnoting the Aristotle sources Durant is paraphrasing.
  • WIST files it under Aristotle only to flag that it is “a summary by Will Durant,” not Aristotle’s own words.
  • A UMass Boston “Quote/Unquote” analysis locates the line on p. 87 of the edition it examined and explains why it keeps getting re-credited to Aristotle.
Public domain

The Story of Philosophy was first published in 1926, before the 1931 U.S. public-domain cutoff, so the text of that first edition is in the public domain in the United States. (Durant issued a revised edition in 1933; that later revision is a separate copyright, but the sentence appears in the 1926 original.)

Fact-check

The misattribution

This is the internet’s most persistent philosophy misquote: the sentence is almost universally stamped on Aristotle, complete with a toga portrait. Aristotle never wrote it. The wording is Will Durant’s 1926 paraphrase — which is why crediting Durant, as done here, is the accurate call.

Aristotle wrong author

Aristotle never wrote this sentence. Durant composed it while summarizing the Nicomachean Ethics; the underlying idea is Aristotle’s, but the memorable phrasing is Durant’s. WIST and Wikiquote both make this explicit.

The exact wording trimmed

Durant’s printed sentence is “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The viral form drops “then” and adds a comma — a light clean-up, not a change of meaning.

The thought is Aristotle’s; the sentence is Will Durant’s, from The Story of Philosophy (1926) — as documented on Wikiquote’s sourced Durant page.

Context

Why it matters

The quote is a near-perfect distillation of Aristotle’s theory of virtue: for Aristotle we become just by doing just acts and brave by doing brave acts — character is built through hexis, settled habit, not through single grand gestures. Durant’s genius was to compress pages of the Nicomachean Ethics into one quotable line.

That compression is exactly why it gets misattributed. Readers assume so clean an encapsulation of Aristotle must be Aristotle — and a Greek philosopher’s name carries more authority on a poster than a 20th-century popularizer’s. The irony is tidy: a sentence about the habits we repeat has itself been repeated into a false attribution.

The thought is Aristotle’s. The sentence is Durant’s.

Explore

Filed under

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

Work Growth Character

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.

Wikiquote: Will Durant (sourced)en.wikiquote.org

Prints the full passage and attributes it to The Story of Philosophy (1926), with the Aristotle citations Durant paraphrases.
The Story of Philosophy (Garden City reprint)archive.org

Full text of Durant’s book at the Internet Archive — the 1943 Garden City reprint of the 1926 text, which carries the sentence.
WIST: the passage, tagged as Durantwist.info

Quotation database entry noting the line is “a summary by Will Durant,” not Aristotle’s own words.
UMass Boston: Quote/Unquote analysisblogs.umb.edu

Locates the line on p. 87 of the edition it examined and explains the Aristotle misattribution.
Snopes: Did Aristotle say it?snopes.com

Fact-check on whether the line is Aristotle’s; traces the wording to Will Durant.
Goodreads: the Durant quotationgoodreads.com

Catalogs the quote under Will Durant with the full “Excellence, then, is not an act” wording.

The real author

Will Durant

Will Durant

1885–1981 · American historian & philosopher · Pulitzer Prize (1968)

William James Durant was an American writer and historian who made philosophy and history accessible to a mass audience. His 1926 book The Story of Philosophy was a runaway bestseller and funded the decades of work he and his wife Ariel Durant poured into the eleven-volume The Story of Civilization, for which they won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1926), chapter on Aristotle, “Ethics and the Nature of Happiness” (at p. 87 in the edition examined by the UMass Boston Quote/Unquote blog) — summarizing Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Bk. II.4 and Bk. I.7.

MLA (9th ed.)

Durant, Will. The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. Simon & Schuster, 1926.

APA (7th ed.)

Durant, W. (1926). The Story of Philosophy: The lives and opinions of the greater philosophers. Simon & Schuster.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is not an act, but a habit’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-are-what-we-repeatedly-do-excellence-is-not-an-act-but-a

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