“The moral virtues, then, are produced in us neither by nature nor against nature. Nature, indeed, prepares in us the ground for their reception, but their complete formation is the product of habit.”
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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.
For one swallow does not make a summer, nor does one day and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.
A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.
It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.