Quotes About Excellence

I have always looked at it this way: If you strive like crazy for perfection - an all-out assault on total perfection - at the very least you will hit a high level of excellence, and then you might be able to sleep at night. To accomplish something truly significant, excellence has to become a life plan.

Define excellence vividly, quantitatively. Paint a picture for your most talented employees of what excellence looks like. Keep everyone pushing and pushing toward the right-hand edge of the bell curve.

Excellence in one area is the beginning of excellence in every area.

I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence I can reach for; perfection is God's business.

Those who attain any excellence, commonly spend life in one pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms.

The secret of living a life of excellence is merely a matter of thinking thoughts of excellence. Really, it's a matter of programming our minds with the kind of information that will set us free.

In the end, excellence in education means excellence in teaching, and if this country would give the status to first grade teachers that we give to full professors, this one act alone would revitalize the nation's schools.

The supreme excellence is not to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles. The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without having to fight them.

Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.

Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. You'll be afraid you can't achieve it. It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

True perfection is unattainable, but if you chase perfection you will catch excellence!

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance.

You serve your people by leading them to excellence. That's leadership.

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise; it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it: feel it, and hate in silence.

Every successive generation becomes a living memorial of our public schools, and a living example of their excellence.

It seems to me now that mathematics is capable of an artistic excellence as great as that of any music, perhaps greater; not because the pleasure it gives (although very pure) is comparable, either in intensity or in the number of people who feel it, to that of music, but because it gives in absolute perfection that combination, characteristic of great art, of godlike freedom, with the sense of inevitable destiny; because, in fact, it constructs an ideal world where everything is perfect and yet true.

To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured; to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.

Real excellence, indeed, is most recognized when most openly looked into.

We need timeless principles to steer by in running our organizations and building our personal careers. We need high standards --- the ethics of excellence.

When one of a culture's guiding credos is that "all men are created equal," any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself through mental excellence, is a nuisance.

If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

Basically, to lead without a title is to derive your power within the organisation not from your position but from your competence, effectiveness, relationships, excellence, innovation and ethics.

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

An achievement-oriented culture is very pro-employee - it's so much more fun than one that isn't. Excellence is a tremendous amount of fun; mediocrity is not.

Purists behave as if there was a vintage year when language achieved a measure of excellence which we should all strive to maintain. In fact, there was never such a year. The language of Chaucer's or Shakespeare's time was no better and no worse than that of our own - just different.

To be faithful to your instincts and the impulses that carry you in the direction of the excellence you most desire and value ... surely that is to lead the noble life.

Professional accountability is a good thing. Without it, excellence is merely a pipe dream and even average performance isn't a realistic expectation.

I think everyone is their harshest critic, but I strive for excellence as much as I can because I think it shows.

Excellence does not begin in Washington.

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence.

Excellence calls for character . . . integrity . . . fairness . . . honesty . . . a determination to do what's right. High ethical standards, across the board.

To hate excellence is to hate the gods.

Excellence is the name of the game.

Average is the enemy of excellence, and average commitment will prevent you from enduring to the end.

Charles V used to say that "the more languages a man knew, he was so many more times a man." Each new form of human speech introduces one into a new world of thought and life. So in some degree is it in traversing other continents and mingling with other races. As a hawk flieth not high with one wing, even so a man reacheth not to excellence with one tongue.

True prayer is only another name for the love of God. Its excellence does not consist in the multitude of our words; for our Father knoweth what things we have need of before we ask Him. The true prayer is that of the heart, and the heart prays only for what it desires. To pray, then is to desire -- but to desire what God would have us desire. He who asks what he does not from the bottom of his heart desire, is mistaken in thinking that he prays.

Even where the affections are not strongly moved by any superior excellence, the companions of our childhood always possess a certain power over our minds which hardly any later friend can obtain. They know our infantine dispositions, which, however they may be afterwards modified, are never eradicated; and they can judge of our actions with more certain conclusions as to the integrity of our motives.

God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.

Excellence is never granted to man but as the reward of labor. It argues no small strength of mind to persevere in habits of industry without the pleasure of perceiving those advances, which, like the hand of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which highlights customer satisfaction, workforce empowerment, and increased productivity, has come to symbolize America's commitment to excellence.

Excellence is going the extra mile.

Excellence is not an act but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you will do best.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

Minds are of three kinds: one is capable of thinking for itself; another is able to understand the thinking of others; and a third can neither think for itself nor understand the thinking of others. The first is of the highest excellence, the second is excellent, and the third is worthless.