“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” — Aristotle
At its core, LiveMint’s quote for the day by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle shifts the focus of human potential from grand, one-time moments of inspiration to daily consistency.
What does the quote mean?
To understand the quote, it helps to break it into its two distinct parts:
“We are what we repeatedly do.”
Your identity is the sum total of your regular actions. If you write every day, you are a writer. If you practice a sport every day, you are an athlete. Conversely, if you repeatedly procrastinate, procrastination becomes a defining trait, not just a passing phase. Identity follows action.
“Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Excellence is not an accident, a stroke of luck, or a single heroic effort. You don’t achieve excellence by pulling a single all-nighter or doing one massive workout. It is a long-term byproduct of small, disciplined choices that eventually become automatic.
How is it relevant today?
Even though the underlying philosophy is thousands of years old, it is arguably more critical now than it was in ancient Greece.
- Antidote to ‘instant gratification’ trap: We live in an era of viral success, overnight influencers, and instant results. Algorithms condition us to expect immediate rewards.
Aristotle reminds us that sustainable success and mastery cannot be fast-tracked. Whether you are learning a complex skill, building a business, or preparing for a major professional exam, real progress happens in the unglamorous, daily routines that no one sees. - Redefining identity through micro-habits: In modern psychology, this philosophy underpins behavioural science. Popular frameworks, like James Clear’s Atomic Habits, echo this exact principle: “Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.”
If you want to change your life, you don’t start with a massive, overwhelming lifestyle overhaul. You start by changing small, daily micro-habits, because those repetitions gradually rewire how you view yourself. - Managing cognitive fatigue: Our world is incredibly noisy, and we make thousands of decisions every day, which can lead to decision fatigue. When you turn a positive behaviour (like reading, exercising, or planning your day) into a habit, it moves from your conscious mind to your subconscious. It stops requiring willpower.
By automating the “excellence” part of your day, you free up mental energy for deep, creative thinking.
When did Aristotle say this?
There’s a bit of a plot twist: Aristotle never actually said or wrote those exact words.
While the quote is widely attributed to the ancient Greek philosopher, it is actually from an American historian and philosopher named Will Durant. He wrote it in 1926.
Will Durant published a bestselling book called The Story of Philosophy. In a chapter breaking down Aristotle’s famous work on ethics (Nicomachean Ethics), Durant summarised a lengthy, dense philosophical argument into one punchy line.
In his text, he explicitly included quotes from Aristotle but used his own words to stitch them together.
The original passage 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’ [quoting Aristotle]; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
Because Durant summarised the concept so brilliantly, readers over the decades began lifting that final sentence and attributing the entire sentiment directly to Aristotle.
Though Aristotle didn’t coin the famous phrase, Durant didn’t misrepresent him. The quote perfectly captures the core of Aristotle’s virtue ethics.
In Nicomachean Ethics (written around 350 BCE), Aristotle argued that virtues aren’t innate traits we are born with; they are skills we develop through practice: “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”
