Excellence Is Not an Art Its Pure Habit We Are What We Repeatedly Doã¯â»â¿ Reply

Yesterday, longtime offensive lineman Matt Light (left, bearded) announced his retirement from the New England Patriots. During the moving and humorous ceremony, he turned to a quotation attributed to Aristotle (right, also bearded).
Low-cal ended his prepared remarks this way, co-ordinate to a transcript from espn.com [emphasis added]:

I kind of wanted to terminate it with this. I always expect to something that someone else has said. When I was looking through a list of dissimilar quotes, I plant i from Aristotle. It was fitting to not simply where I'one thousand at in my life, but experiences I've had in this organization, merely all the people I've met: "Nosotros are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an human action, but a habit." Nosotros hear it here five g times a calendar week. Simply worry near yourself, non others, go far function of your routine. Continue striving to exercise information technology amend and improve. The excellence we all shared as an arrangement, teammates, friends, everyone else. It's not merely as an human activity, it's a habit, information technology'south how we live our lives, what we try to do twenty-four hours-in and solar day-out. I hope this habit continues. Thanks.

Journalist Julian Benbow described it this way in his recap almost the retirement ceremony, which was posted at 12:32 p.m. Monday on Boston.com.

Calorie-free said while he was preparing his spoken communication, he pored over quotes until he establish ane from Aristotle that sounded similar a philospher's [sic] translation of something Belichick says over and over again.
"You are what you do repeatedly," the philosopher said. "And then your excellence isn't an act, it's a habit."

The quotation was also mentioned in the Web site of the Boston Herald in this summary:

Light ended with a favorite quote from Aristotle: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is non an act, merely a addiction."

The sentiment certainly sounds great. And it sounds similar something that should adorn a wall at Foxboro Stadium.
The problem is that ARISTOTLE DID NOT SAY IT.
Every bit far every bit I can tell, those words were really written by Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers.
In part VII of that volume, dealing with "Ethics and the Nature of Happiness," Durant sums upwards some of Aristotle's thoughts. Later quoting a phrase from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ("these virtues are formed in man past his doing the actions"), Durant sums it upwardly this mode: "…we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is non an act just a habit." And then he quotes again from Aristotle's work. The footnotes ane and 2 in the excerpt at left refer to passages in Aristotle'southward Ethics, ii, 4. (The passage at left is from Page 87 of an edition of Durant'south book that bubbled up in GoogleBooks. Ane explanation of the misattribution is in this Wikipedia entry.)
This is an instance of the way that provocative words tend to gravitate toward famous mouths. As the great quote-sleuth Ralph Keyes wrote in The Quote Verifier: "clever lines … routinely travel from obscure mouths to prominent ones…."
In this case, the journey was from the Due north Adams, Mass., native Durant (correct), who lived from 1885 to 1981, to Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC.
I'thousand not faulting Matt Calorie-free. For one thing, it's refreshing to hear the give-and-take "Aristotle" in an NFL-related press briefing. He was probably using an Internet source such as BrainyQuote, which wrongly attributes the comment to Aristotle.
Journalists, however, who pride themselves on "checking the facts" should not exist lazy nearly passing on–unthinkingly–such misattribution.
Remember the shopworn journalistic bromide: "If your mother says she loves you, cheque it out."

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Source: https://blogs.umb.edu/quoteunquote/2012/05/08/its-a-much-more-effective-quotation-to-attribute-it-to-aristotle-rather-than-to-will-durant/

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