"Character is simply habit long continued"
About this Quote
“Character” gets romanticized as some inner essence, a moral DNA you’re born with. Plutarch punctures that myth with a dry, almost austere reduction: it’s “simply habit long continued.” The word simply does heavy work here. He’s not offering comfort; he’s stripping away alibis. If character is accumulated behavior, then virtue isn’t a mood and vice isn’t a mystery. They’re practice.
The intent is practical and civic-minded, very Plutarch. Writing in a world where ethics wasn’t therapy but training, he frames morality as something forged through repetition, like rhetoric or swordsmanship. The subtext is a rebuke to people who treat their worst impulses as “just who I am.” No: who you are is what you keep doing, especially when no one is watching and no one is applauding.
It also smuggles in an unsettling egalitarianism. If character is habit, then it’s at least partly available to anyone willing to submit to the grind of self-shaping. That’s empowering, but it’s also punitive: you don’t get to outsource responsibility to temperament, destiny, or a single dramatic moment of redemption. Time is the real judge in this formulation, because habit requires duration; it turns ethics into a long game.
In Plutarch’s larger context - a biographer of Greek and Roman exemplars - this line doubles as a reading instruction. Don’t admire heroes for their highlights. Look for their routines. The “great man” is, unglamorously, a person who kept doing the right thing until it started looking like nature.
The intent is practical and civic-minded, very Plutarch. Writing in a world where ethics wasn’t therapy but training, he frames morality as something forged through repetition, like rhetoric or swordsmanship. The subtext is a rebuke to people who treat their worst impulses as “just who I am.” No: who you are is what you keep doing, especially when no one is watching and no one is applauding.
It also smuggles in an unsettling egalitarianism. If character is habit, then it’s at least partly available to anyone willing to submit to the grind of self-shaping. That’s empowering, but it’s also punitive: you don’t get to outsource responsibility to temperament, destiny, or a single dramatic moment of redemption. Time is the real judge in this formulation, because habit requires duration; it turns ethics into a long game.
In Plutarch’s larger context - a biographer of Greek and Roman exemplars - this line doubles as a reading instruction. Don’t admire heroes for their highlights. Look for their routines. The “great man” is, unglamorously, a person who kept doing the right thing until it started looking like nature.
Quote Details
| Topic | Habits |
|---|
More Quotes by Plutarch
Add to List
