A famous passage on the relationship of virtue, or excellence, to practice comes from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in his chapter on Aristotle, in which Durant quotes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: 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
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