Aristotle quote: virtue is a habit

[Northern_Piper]

I’m trying to find a Aristotle quote.

My recollection is something like: “virtue, then, is not a quality, but a habit.”

Can anyone help me with it? Nichomachean Ethics, perhaps?

[typoink]

No cite, but the quote is “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

From a quick googling. Should make hunting easier.

[Captain_Amazing]

Book two of the Nicomachean Ethics?

VIRTUE, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name (ethike) is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. 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 lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

This is confirmed by what happens in states; for legislators make the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this is the wish of every legislator, and those who do not effect it miss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitution differs from a bad one.

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every virtue is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the virtues also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states of character arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.

[Northern_Piper]

Interesting - typoink’s quotation is what I’m thinking of, but it’s not found in the passage Captain Amazing has found - sound smore like a pithy summary than what Aristotle actually wrote?

[njtt]

Well, we are dealing here with translations of texts that are often difficult and sometimes corrupted by poor copying, so different translations of Aristotle can often be noticeably different. That said, though, I do not see anything in Captain Amazing’s quotation that looks like a very plausible alternative translation of typoink’s (although the overall senses certainly seems to agree).

[typoink]

Per Wikiquote, it’s a misattributed quote. The pithy form is actually a summarization of passages in book 2 of the Nichomachean Ethics from the 1926 book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers by Will Durant.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

It does make some sense to regard a virtue as a habit. On the opposite side of the spectrum, consider what Cecil said about the Seven Deadly Sins:

To be strictly accurate, the preferred term isn’t seven deadly sins but seven capital vices, which better conveys the thought that the seven aren’t sins in themselves, merely habits or predilections disposing one thereto. This point was made by Saint Gregory the Great in the sixth century AD and later restated by Aquinas. But the term seven deadly sins survives for obvious reasons–it sounds a lot snappier.

To take a sin–gluttony–at random: I take this to mean that a habit or pre-disposition to gluttonous over-consumption is what is meant. IOW to be punished for sin or rewarded for virtue, you need to habitually live out the character quality in question. Most people, or at least most omnivorous people probably over-eat during traditionally food-centered holidays, but that doesn’t make them gluttons unless they do that sort of thing the year round.