I'll just toss this in, since I haven't seen someone else put it out out there yet:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act
rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
because we have acted rightly;
'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:
'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in
a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man
blessed and happy'
-- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of
the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and
Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness