We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
What it means
You don’t become a good person first and then act well; you become good by acting well. Courage, fairness and self-control are learned the way a craft is learned, by practising them until they become habits.
Aristotle compares virtue to building and playing the lyre: nobody is born a builder or a musician, and nobody is born just or brave. The capacity is natural, but the virtue itself comes from repetition.
The context
Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics asks how people come to be good. Aristotle’s answer starts with habit. Moral virtue, he says, comes about as a result of habit, which is why the Greek word for it, ethike, is a slight variation on ethos, habit. None of the virtues arises in us by nature: “we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.”
The arts work the same way: “the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” Bad habits form by the same route, he adds, since “it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced.” He ends the chapter with the conclusion: “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.”
Why it matters
It’s tempting to wait until we feel brave, patient or generous before acting that way. Aristotle reverses the order: the acting comes first, and the character follows. That makes being good less a matter of who we are and more a matter of what we keep doing.
It also cuts both ways. Every small act is practice for something, so the question for any ordinary day is what we’re practising. Each kind act makes the next one easier, and so does each short temper.
About Aristotle
Greek philosopher, 384–322 BC
Aristotle was born in 384 BC in Stagira, in Chalkidiki in northern Greece. At about eighteen he joined Plato’s Academy in Athens, and from 343 BC he was tutor to the young Alexander the Great. He later set up his own school in Athens, at the Lyceum, which became known as the Peripatetic school.
His writings span the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology and the arts. He died in 322 BC in Chalcis, on the island of Euboea.
The source, and how we checked it
It comes from Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, chapter 1 (translated by W. D. Ross), c. 350 BC.
The full passage:
For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyreplayers by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
We matched the quote word for word against W. D. Ross's translation on MIT's Internet Classics Archive, which dates the work to 350 BC. It is the second half of a longer sentence ("so too we become just…"), so the quote here starts with a capital letter. Aristotle wrote in Greek, and other translations word it differently. We last checked this on 1 November 2026.