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… - Will Durant

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.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

"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";[69] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit;"

"Pessimism is a sign of decay, optimism is a sign of superficiality; "tragic optimism" is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience, even at the cost of woe, and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life."

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love. History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.