Incentives, Routines, and Self-Command

Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectualvirtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching... while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whencealso its name is one that is formed by a slight variation fromthe word (habit).... Of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquirethe potentiality and later exhibit the activity... but the virtueswe get by first exercising them.... men become builders by buildingand lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become justby doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, braveby doing brave acts. This is confirmed by what happens in states; for legislatorsmake the citizens good by forming habits in them, and this isthe wish for every legislator, and those who do not effect itmiss their mark, and it is in this that a good constitutiondiffers from a bad one.