Success Is Not an Art It Is a Habit

Yesterday, longtime offensive lineman Matt Lite (left, disguised) announced his retirement from the New England Patriots. During the moving and humorous anniversary, he turned to a quotation attributed to Aristotle (right, as well bearded).
Calorie-free ended his prepared remarks this manner, according to a transcript from espn.com [emphasis added]:

I kind of wanted to end it with this. I always look to something that someone else has said. When I was looking through a listing of different quotes, I found ane from Aristotle. It was plumbing fixtures to non only where I'1000 at in my life, but experiences I've had in this arrangement, only all the people I've met: "Nosotros are what we repeatedly practice. Excellence, and then, is non an act, merely a habit." We hear it here v thousand times a week. Just worry about yourself, not others, make information technology part of your routine. Proceed striving to do it better and better. The excellence we all shared as an organization, teammates, friends, everyone else. It'due south not just as an human activity, it'due south a addiction, it's how we alive our lives, what we try to exercise 24-hour interval-in and day-out. I hope this habit continues. Thank you lot.

Journalist Julian Benbow described information technology this way in his epitomize about the retirement anniversary, which was posted at 12:32 p.thousand. Monday on Boston.com.

Light said while he was preparing his spoken language, he pored over quotes until he found one from Aristotle that sounded like a philospher'south [sic] translation of something Belichick says over and over again.
"You are what you lot do repeatedly," the philosopher said. "And then your excellence isn't an human activity, it'south a habit."

The quotation was as well mentioned in the Spider 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 not an act, but a habit."

The sentiment certainly sounds great. And it sounds like something that should adorn a wall at Foxboro Stadium.
The trouble is that ARISTOTLE DID NOT SAY IT.
As far every bit I tin can tell, those words were actually written past Will Durant in The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Globe's Greatest Philosophers.
In role Seven of that book, dealing with "Ideals and the Nature of Happiness," Durant sums upwards some of Aristotle's thoughts. Subsequently quoting a phrase from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics ("these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions"), Durant sums it up this manner: "…nosotros are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act but a addiction." So he quotes over again from Aristotle'due south work. The footnotes i and two in the extract at left refer to passages in Aristotle's Ethics, two, 4. (The passage at left is from Page 87 of an edition of Durant's book that bubbled up in GoogleBooks. One explanation of the misattribution is in this Wikipedia entry.)
This is an example of the mode that provocative words tend to gravitate toward famous mouths. As the slap-up 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 N Adams, Mass., native Durant (correct), who lived from 1885 to 1981, to Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC.
I'chiliad not faulting Matt Light. For one thing, it's refreshing to hear the word "Aristotle" in an NFL-related press conference. He was probably using an Internet source such as BrainyQuote, which wrongly attributes the comment to Aristotle.
Journalists, nonetheless, who pride themselves on "checking the facts" should not be lazy about passing on–unthinkingly–such misattribution.
Call up the shopworn journalistic bromide: "If your mother says she loves you lot, check it out."

keenanficame83.blogspot.com

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/

Share this post