Often credited to Aristotle (384 BC to 322 BC), this saying is a variant of Will Durant’s 1926 summary of his ideas: “Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.”
Will Durant, summarising Aristotle, The Story of Philosophy (1926)
A note on the source: the line is usually quoted as Aristotle’s, but Durant wrote it more than two thousand years later: “Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” The quality version is a later variant. Aristotle’s own point was close to it: we become good at things by repeatedly doing them.
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