Saturday, February 28, 2009

Poker gems, #220

Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926), Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books, 1991, Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness.


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.... [W]e are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.


[Note: This quotation is frequently attributed, erroneously, to Aristotle. It is actually Durant's paraphrase of Aristotle. See here.]

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