Claims that Aristotle once stated, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
Thoughts on the Archaeology of Identity "We are what we repeatedly do. This little gem attributed to Aristotle pops up in training workshops, motivational posters, and even tattoos — but, as it turns out, those words were not written by Aristotle but by the philosopher Will Durant in 1926. It’s too bad for Durant that a well-expressed idea travels farther under a famous name. Where Aristotle had waffled pedantically on the question of whether virtue was attainable, Durant offers hope of attaining it ("Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit"). Where Aristotle narrowly focused on describing virtue, Durant describes a broad model of human identity ("We are what we repeatedly do"). No wonder we forgot the hand-wringing and went with the sound byte. [...] Bourdieu answered the question that arises from Durant’s equation: if people are what they repeatedly do, how does an observer who knows what someone does figure out who they are? In everyday life we make such inferences about other people casually. But a scientist, even a social scientist, has to be more rigorous.