Meaning

The line is making a distinction between a single performance and a sustained pattern. Any person can act excellently once, under pressure or by accident, but true excellence belongs to those who have built it into their daily practice. Character is not something you display on special occasions; it is something you construct, slowly and deliberately, through what you choose to do again and again. The real measure of a person is their habits, not their highlights.

Context

Will Durant wrote this in The Story of Philosophy, published in 1926, as part of his accessible summary of Aristotle's ethics. The underlying idea belongs to Aristotle, who argued in his Nicomachean Ethics that virtues are formed through repeated practice rather than inherited or simply decided upon. Durant's paraphrase distilled Aristotle's thinking into a form that general readers could absorb and remember. The line is so well constructed that it is now widely attributed to Aristotle himself, though the exact phrasing is Durant's.

About the author

Will Durant was an American historian and philosopher born in 1885. He dedicated much of his career to making the history of philosophy and civilization accessible to ordinary readers rather than academic specialists. His multi-volume series The Story of Civilization, co-written with his wife Ariel Durant, earned the pair a Pulitzer Prize. His gift was synthesis: the ability to take complex thought and render it clearly without losing its substance. He died in 1981, just days after his wife.