Habit Quotes: 46 Sourced, 5 Commonly Misattributed
The most quoted habit line, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit,” is Will Durant's, written in The Story of Philosophy (1926) to summarise Aristotle. Four more in heavy circulation, credited to Dryden, Johnson and Allen, return zero hits in those authors' own works. This page sources 46 habit quotes.
The most shared quote about habits on the internet is credited to the wrong person. It appears on posters, in keynote decks and at the top of almost every habit quotes page, under the name Aristotle, and Aristotle never wrote it. What follows is 46 habit quotes where the source can be checked, and the five famous ones where it cannot.
Who actually wrote the most famous quote about habits?
Will Durant wrote it, in 1926, in The Story of Philosophy. The full passage in his chapter on Aristotle reads: “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly ... we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” Durant was compressing several pages of the Nicomachean Ethics into one sentence of his own prose. The sentence then travelled on its own, lost its author, and picked up Aristotle’s name because Aristotle is the subject of the chapter.
Misattribution is the assignment of a quotation to a person who did not produce it. In quote collections it usually happens by drift: a writer paraphrases an older thinker, the paraphrase is quoted with the older thinker’s name attached, and each later copy repeats the attribution without returning to the original text.
Which habit quotes are misattributed, and what does the search show?
Five. Each row below names the author the quote is usually credited to, the text that was actually searched, and what came back. Every search was run on 9 September 2026 against plain text rather than scans, so the counts are exact rather than approximate.
| Quote | Usually credited to | What was searched | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. | Aristotle | Nicomachean Ethics, Chase translation, full Project Gutenberg text | Not Aristotle. Verbatim in Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926. |
| We first make our habits, and then our habits make us. | John Dryden | Seven Project Gutenberg volumes of Dryden, two of the Poetical Works and five of the collected Works, 4,458,206 characters | 0 occurrences of “make our habits” or “habits make us”. |
| The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. | Samuel Johnson, and often Warren Buffett | Five volumes of Johnson’s own works plus four volumes of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, about 9.2 million characters | 0 occurrences of “chains of habit”. |
| Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny. | James Allen, and variously Emerson and Charles Reade | As a Man Thinketh, full Project Gutenberg text, 63,590 characters | 0 occurrences of “sow a thought”, “reap a habit” or “reap a destiny”. |
| Same Durant sentence, second-hand: listed as a Stephen Covey quote. | Stephen R. Covey | success.com, its 50 habits quotes page, read 9 September 2026 | Split across two authors on one page. The page lists the sentence under 7 Habits quotes, and separately quotes Durant’s “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation” as Durant. Both come from the same paragraph of the same 1926 book. |
The fifth row is the one worth sitting with, because it shows how the drift happens rather than just that it happened. Covey quotes the sentence in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and credits it to Aristotle. A quote page then lifts it out of Covey’s book and files it as a Covey quote. On azquotes.com, read the same day, the sentence is correctly credited to Will Durant, with no book and no year, on a page that does print a full source line for other quotes.
What did Aristotle actually write about habit?
He wrote that virtues are acquired by performing single acts, one at a time. The Chase translation of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics puts it like this: “the Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working, which, again, is the case of other things, as the arts for instance ... men come to be builders, for instance, by building; harp-players, by playing on the harp: exactly so, by doing just actions we come to be just.” That is the mechanism Durant compressed. It is also, incidentally, a better quote than the one people use, because it names the unit of change: the single act, not the finished character.
Aristotle names the unit of change. Not the finished character, the single act.
Aristotle is also blunter than his reputation suggests. In the same book: “As for the plea, that a man did not know that habits are produced from separate acts of working, we reply, such ignorance is a mark of excessive stupidity.” That line has never made it onto a poster.
46 habit quotes with a source you can check
None of these came from a quote site. Each group was found by reading the primary text, and the note under each heading says exactly how it was checked. Where a book is still in copyright, the line was confirmed in a scan of the book itself rather than in a page quoting it.
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, Chapter IV, 1890
Read in the full Project Gutenberg text of the 1890 edition. Chapter IV is titled simply Habit and is the founding chapter of habit psychology.
- When we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits.
- Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
- The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.
- Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life.
- Each lapse is like the letting fall of a ball of string which one is carefully winding up; a single slip undoes more than a great many turns will wind again.
- Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right.
- Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.
- We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
- Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.
- Nothing we ever do is, in strict scientific literalness, wiped out.
- Down among his nerve-cells and fibres the molecules are counting it, registering and storing it up to be used against him when the next temptation comes.
- Habit diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed.
- The moment one tries to define what habit is, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter.
- The laws of Nature are nothing but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chase translation
Read in the full Project Gutenberg text of the Chase translation. These are the passages the famous excellence quote is a paraphrase of.
- By doing just actions we come to be just; by doing the actions of self-mastery we come to be perfected in self-mastery; and by doing brave actions brave.
- The Virtues we get by first performing single acts of working.
- Virtue then is assumed to be that habit which is such, in relation to pleasures and pains, as to effect the best results, and Vice the contrary.
- As for the plea, that a man did not know that habits are produced from separate acts of working, we reply, such ignorance is a mark of excessive stupidity.
- For this reason the food, and manner of living generally, ought to be the subject of legal regulation, because things when become habitual will not be disagreeable.
Epictetus, Discourses and Encheiridion, Long translation, second century
Read in the full Project Gutenberg text of the Long translation. Epictetus is the oldest source here that describes something close to habit tracking.
- Every habit and faculty is maintained and increased by the corresponding actions: the habit of walking by walking, the habit of running by running.
- Generally then if you would make anything a habit, do it; if you would not make it a habit, do not do it, but accustom yourself to do something else in place of it.
- If then you wish not to be of an angry temper, do not feed the habit: throw nothing on it which will increase it: at first keep quiet, and count the days on which you have not been angry.
- For the habit at first begins to be weakened, and then is completely destroyed.
- If it is habit which annoys us, we must try to seek aid against habit.
- For first, and what causes most trouble, a habit of not attending is formed in you; then a habit of deferring your attention.
- For if you are not yet in this state, fly from your former habits, fly from the common sort, if you intend ever to begin to be something.
Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Cotton translation
Read in the full Project Gutenberg text of the complete Essays in the Cotton translation.
- Long toleration begets habit; habit, consent and imitation.
- One may disown and retract the vices that surprise us, and to which we are hurried by passions; but those which by a long habit are rooted in a strong and vigorous will are not subject to contradiction.
- As to the rest, I am so far from being arrived at the first and most perfect degree of excellence, where virtue is turned into habit, that even of the second I have made no great proofs.
Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, 1926
Found in scanned copies of the book through Open Library full-text search, which returns the surrounding paragraph. Both sentences sit in the same passage.
- Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.
- We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
James Clear, Atomic Habits, 2018
Each line confirmed in the scanned text of the book itself through Open Library full-text search, not in a quote aggregator.
- Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
- You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
- Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, 1989
Confirmed through Open Library full-text search in scans that quote the passage with the book named.
- Our character, basically, is a composite of our habits.
- Habits are powerful factors in our lives.
James Allen, As a Man Thinketh, 1903
Read in the full Project Gutenberg text. These are the sentences Allen actually wrote about habit, which is worth knowing given what gets credited to him.
- Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes into habit, and habit solidifies into circumstance.
- The body is a delicate and plastic instrument, which responds readily to the thoughts by which it is impressed, and habits of thought will produce their own effects, good or bad, upon it.
Adam Smith and Benjamin Franklin, The Wealth of Nations, 1776, and the Autobiography
Read in the full Project Gutenberg texts of both. Franklin's line comes from his account of running his own thirteen-virtue chart.
- The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.
- He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.
- While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason.
Novelists, George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1871, and James Joyce, Dubliners and Ulysses
Read in the full Project Gutenberg texts. Novelists describe what a habit feels like from the inside, which is the part the motivational lists leave out.
- It must be remembered that he had never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, and he walked by habit, not by self-criticism.
- There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
- I suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope.
- A habit reprehensible at puberty is second nature and an opprobrium in middle life.
- Evidently she had been unfit to live, without any strength of purpose, an easy prey to habits, one of the wrecks on which civilisation has been reared.
Do these quotes hold up against habit research?
Three of the best known claims survive, one does not, and one is a metaphor rather than a measurement. A quote being correctly attributed says nothing about whether it is true, so the table below tests the claim inside each one against published work.
| The quote | The claim inside it | What the research says | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| James: never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted | One slip undoes the work | Lally and colleagues (2010) tracked 96 people forming a daily habit and found that missing a single opportunity did not measurably affect automaticity. Repeated inconsistency did. | Overstated |
| Aristotle: by doing just actions we come to be just | Repetition, not intention, produces the trait | Wood, Quinn and Kashy (2002) found that a large share of daily behaviour is repeated in stable contexts and runs without deliberation. | Holds |
| Epictetus: count the days on which you have not been angry | Recording the behaviour changes the behaviour | Harkin and colleagues (2016) meta-analysed 138 experiments and found that prompting people to monitor goal progress improved attainment, with larger effects when the record was made public. | Holds |
| Clear: habits are the compound interest of self-improvement | Small daily gains compound over time | A metaphor rather than a measured effect. The largest test to date, Milkman and colleagues (2021) in Nature, ran 54 gym attendance interventions on 61,293 people and found gains that largely did not persist once the four-week programme ended. | Useful, not measured |
| Durant: excellence is not an act but a habit | Skill is a product of repetition | Directionally consistent with the same literature, though the sentence is a summary of Aristotle rather than a research finding, and was never presented as one. | Holds, with a caveat |
How StellarHabit treats the quotes it disagrees with
We built the app around the Lally finding rather than the James rule. StellarHabit measures a consistency percentage over a period instead of a streak, so one missed day moves a number slightly rather than destroying a count. That is a direct consequence of the row above: if a single lapse has no measurable effect on automaticity, a tracker that punishes it is teaching the wrong lesson.
The Epictetus line is the other one we took literally. Counting the days you did not do the thing is the whole mechanism, and the meta-analysis says the count works better when someone else can see it, which is why the percentage is visible to a small group rather than private. Our limits, stated plainly: there is no money at stake, and it is not built for solitary tracking, so if you want a private log nobody else sees, this is not the right tool. If you want the underlying research rather than the quotes, start with how long habit formation actually takes and how to build good habits. For the book most of the modern quotes come from, there is a chapter by chapter summary of Atomic Habits.
Frequently asked questions
Who said we are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act but a habit?
Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy, published in 1926. The sentence appears in his chapter on Aristotle, where he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own prose. Because Aristotle is the subject of the chapter, the name travelled with the sentence and the quote is now almost always credited to him.
Did Aristotle say excellence is a habit?
Not in those words. What Aristotle wrote in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics is that the virtues are acquired by performing single acts: men come to be builders by building, harp-players by playing on the harp, and by doing just actions we come to be just. Durant compressed several pages of that argument into the sentence people quote.
What is the full Will Durant quote about excellence?
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. The two halves are usually quoted separately, and sometimes credited to two different people.
Who really said we first make our habits and then our habits make us?
Nobody can point to a primary source. The line is almost always credited to John Dryden. Searching the plain text of seven Project Gutenberg volumes of Dryden, two of the Poetical Works and five of the collected Works, about 4.5 million characters, returns no occurrence of make our habits or habits make us.
Did Samuel Johnson write the chains of habit quote?
There is no evidence for it in his published work. Searching five volumes of Johnson's own works and four volumes of Boswell's Life of Johnson, roughly 9.2 million characters of plain text, returns no occurrence of the phrase chains of habit. The same quote is also widely credited to Warren Buffett, which is usually a sign that no one knows the origin.
Why are there no page numbers on the Atomic Habits quotes?
Because page numbers differ between the hardback, the paperback and the ebook, so a page number copied from one edition is wrong for most readers. Each line on this page was instead confirmed in the scanned text of the book itself through Open Library full-text search, which is a check anyone can repeat in a browser.
Sources
- Durant, W. (1926). The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers. Simon & Schuster.
- Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle (D. P. Chase, Trans.). Project Gutenberg eBook 8438.
- James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1, Chapter IV: Habit. Henry Holt and Company. Project Gutenberg eBook 57628.
- Epictetus. A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus with the Encheiridion (G. Long, Trans.). Project Gutenberg eBook 10661.
- Allen, J. (1903). As a Man Thinketh. Project Gutenberg eBook 4507.
- Clear, J. (2018). Atomic Habits. Avery. Quotations confirmed in the scanned text through Open Library full-text search.
- Covey, S. R. (1989). The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Free Press.
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009.
- Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281–1297.
- Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229.
- Milkman, K. L., Gromet, D., Ho, H., Kay, J. S., Lee, T. W., Pandiloski, P., Park, Y., Rai, A., et al. (2021). Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science. Nature, 600(7889), 478–483.