These quotes span more than two thousand years, and they agree on one thing: we become what we repeatedly do.
Aristotle put it most plainly: “we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” Epictetus turned it into an instruction: “if you would make anything a habit, do it; if you would not make it a habit, do not do it, but accustom yourself to do something else in place of it.” Marcus Aurelius applied it to the mind (“the soul is dyed by the thoughts”), and William James, writing as a psychologist in 1899, warned how quickly the pattern sets: we soon become “mere walking bundles of habits.”
The others are about changing habits once they’ve formed. Benjamin Franklin found that knowing what was right “was not sufficient to prevent our slipping,” so he worked on one habit at a time and marked his faults every evening. Seneca kept a similar nightly review, going over everything he had said and done once the lamp was out. Tchaikovsky’s habit was simply to keep working on days without inspiration. And Samuel Johnson explains why all of this needs repeating: we “more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
Read together, they make habit less a matter of willpower and more a matter of practice. Choose what to repeat, replace what you want to stop, and look back at the end of each day.
We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.
Generally then if you would make anything a habit, do it; if you would not make it a habit, do not do it, but accustom yourself to do something else in place of it.
Epictetus, Discourses, "How We Should Struggle Against Appearances" (translated by George Long), before c. AD 135
Meaning and context
Such as are thy habitual thoughts, such also will be the character of thy mind; for the soul is dyed by the thoughts.
I make use of this privilege, and daily plead my cause before myself: when the lamp is taken out of my sight, and my wife, who knows my habit, has ceased to talk, I pass the whole day in review before myself, and repeat all that I have said and done.
Seneca, On Anger, Book III, 36 (translated by Aubrey Stewart, 1889), before AD 65
Meaning and context
Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.
I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct.
We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic.
