Q0105

Aristotle

A verified English rendering from the curated archive.

English

We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts.
Thinker Aristotle
School Peripatetic School
Source Nicomachean Ethics II.1
Theme Habit
Another quotation More from this thinker

Source context

This English passage is associated with Nicomachean Ethics II.1, within the tradition of Peripatetic School. The wording below is a verified rendering prepared for careful reading rather than a claim of unique translation authority.

A short reading

Read in the register of habit, the sentence asks the reader to test an assumption rather than to collect a slogan. In Aristotle's wider work, similar claims are usually offered as prompts for judgment: what would have to be true for the sentence to hold, and what would follow if it did?

How to cite this quotation

APA: Aristotle. (n.d.). We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts. In Philosophy Blind Box. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0105

MLA: Aristotle. “We become just by doing just acts, temperate….” Philosophy Blind Box, https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0105.

Chicago: Aristotle. “We become just by doing just acts, temperate….” Philosophy Blind Box. Accessed 2026. https://www.philosophydef.com/quotes/q0105.

Same thinker

More from Aristotle

  1. It is through wonder that people both now begin and first began to philosophize.
  2. The human good is activity of soul in accordance with virtue.
  3. Virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature; we are fitted by nature to receive them, and are brought to completion by habit.
  4. Virtue is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean relative to us.
  5. Man is by nature a political animal.

All quotations by Aristotle

Same theme

More on habit

  1. Virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature; we are fitted by nature to receive them, and are brought to completion by habit.
  2. Your mind will take the shape of what you frequently hold in thought, for the soul is dyed by its impressions.
  3. Habit is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.
  4. So too, by doing just acts we become just, by doing temperate acts temperate, and by doing brave acts brave.
  5. Habit and nature come to completion together and transform with each other.

Browse the habit theme