evidence: It’s possible that you’ve come across the quote, "we are what we repeatedly do," with the name of the famous Greek philosopher and polymath written underneath. Though it seems that Aristotle did not say these precise words, they were written by a man that was discussing the ideas of Aristotle in his text Nicomachean Ethics. [...] "We are what we repeatedly do" is only a portion of a longer quote by Will Durant. Often misattributed to Aristotle– which we’ll touch more upon later– these words are found in the section of Durant’s book The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World’s Greatest Philosophers about Aristotle. [...] "The golden mean, however, is not, like the mathematical mean, an exact average of two precisely calculable extremes; it fluctuates with the collateral circumstances of each situation, and discovers itself only to mature and flexible reason. 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 good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life;... for as it is not one swallow or one find day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.""