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We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotlemisattributed·The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant·1926

Wrongly attributed

This is Will Durant, not Aristotle, and Durant is not translating -- he is summarising the Nicomachean Ethics in his own words and marking the difference by dropping the quotation marks he uses on either side of it. The nearest thing in Aristotle is that virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions, which Durant does put in quotation marks in the same sentence. The memorable half is the half Durant wrote. It usually circulates with a therefore inserted and the excellence turned into a moral instruction, neither of which is in the book.

Character, says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms, character is destiny. But not the whole of our destiny.

Heraclitusmisattributed·The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot·1860

Wrongly attributed

Character is destiny is routinely credited to Heraclitus, on the strength of a fragment usually given as a man's character is his fate. That translation is itself contested, and the English aphorism does not come from it: it comes from Novalis, and reached English readers through George Eliot, who quotes him here in 1860 and immediately qualifies it. The half everyone drops is the half Eliot wrote.