Quotes About Behavior

habits of virtue and vice are caused by acts

Excellence is an Art Won by Training and Habit. We do not act rightly Because we have Virtue and Excellence, But rather, we have Virtue and Excellence Because we act rightly.

Each type of activity produces the corresponding sort of person

Actions which produce [virtue] are those which increase it, and also, if differently performed, destroy it.

Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do the virtues arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.

For 'activity in conformity with virtue' involves virtue.

A man may possess the disposition without its producing any good result.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.

There is no such thing as observing a mean in excess or deficiency, nor as exceeding or falling short in observance of a mean.

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.

The actions from which [virtue] was produced are also those in which it is exercised.

since to avoid the painful and aim at the pleasurable is one of the most obvious tendencies of human nature.

Not every action or emotion however admits of the observance of a due mean

None of the moral virtues is engendered in us by nature, for no natural property can be altered by habit.

The virtues therefore are engendered in us neither by nature nor yet in violation of nature; nature gives us the capacity to receive the,. and this capacity is brought to maturity by habit.

It is therefore not of small moment whether we are trained from adulthood in one set of habits or another; on the contrary it is of very great, or rather supreme importance.

Moral virtue is the quality of acting in the best way in relation to pleasures and pains, and that vice is the opposite.

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes; chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.

Excellence is not an act, but habit.

Aristotle insists that habituation, not teaching, is the route to moral virtue (II. 1). We must practise doing good actions, not just read about virtue.

Excellence is not an act, but a habit.

What then is a moral virtue, the result of such a process duly directed? It is no mere mood of feeling, no mere liability to emotion, no mere natural aptitude or endowment, it is a permanent state of the agent's self, or, as we might in modern phrase put it, of his will, it consists in a steady self-imposed obedience to a rule of action in certain situations which frequently recur in human life.

Excellence then is not an act but a habit.

95% of everything you do is the result of habit.