Seven virtues
The "Catechism of the Catholic Church" defines virtue as "a habitual and firm disposition to do the good." Traditionally, the seven Christian virtues or heavenly virtues combine the four classical cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and courage (or fortitude) with the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. These were adopted by the Church Fathers as the seven virtues.
Nicomachean Ethics
According to Aristotle, character properly understood (i.e. one's virtue or vice), is not just any tendency or habit but something that affects when we feel pleasure or pain. A virtuous person feels pleasure when she performs the most beautiful or noble ("kalos") actions. A person who is not virtuous will often find his or her perceptions of what is most pleasant to be misleading. For this reason, any concern with virtue or politics requires consideration of pleasure and pain. When a person does virtuous actions, for example by chance, or under advice, they are not yet necessarily a virtuous person. It is not like in the productive arts, where the thing being made is what is judged as well made or not. To truly be a virtuous person, one's virtuous actions must meet three conditions: (a) they are done knowingly, (b) they are chosen for their own sakes, and (c) they are chosen according to a stable disposition (not at a whim, or in any way that the acting person might easily change his choice about). And just knowing what would be virtuous is not enough. According to Aristotle's analysis, three kinds of things come to be present in the soul that virtue is: a feeling ("pathos"), an inborn predisposition or capacity (dunamis), or a stable disposition that has been acquired (hexis). In fact, it has already been mentioned that virtue is made up of "hexeis", but on this occasion the contrast with feelings and capacities is made clearer—neither is chosen, and neither is praiseworthy in the way that virtue is.