Quotes About Excellence

Success and excellence are not the same. Excellence grows within a person, is largely within that person's control, and its meaning lasts. Success is measured externally, by comparison to others, is often outside our control, and is perishable.

To capture the enemy's entire army is better than to destroy it; to take intact a regiment, a company, or a squad is better than to destroy them. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the supreme of excellence. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the supreme excellence.

To push for excellence today without continuing to push for access for less privileged students is to undermine the crucial but incomplete gains that have been made. Equity and excellence cannot be divided.

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more- from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.

Nothing motivates like success. While academics, consultants and gurus are preoccupied with coming up with great insights and seminal ideas, usually they don't realize that making things happen, achieving operational excellence, moving the organization from uncertainty to clarity, from red ink to black, is what really creates hope for a better future. Therefore, great leadership always involves great ideas and real actions that reinforce a strong belief in the excellence of the decision makers and in the viability of the organization itself.

Excellence is the eternal quest. We achieve it by living up to our highest intellectual standards and our finest moral intuitions. In seeking excellence, take life seriously-but never yourself!

Perfection. Excellence. What a passionate lover. But once having tasted the lips of excellence, once having given oneself to its perfection, how dreary and burdensome and filled with anomie are the remainder of one's waking hours trapped in the shackled lock-step of the merely ordinary, the barely acceptable, the just okay and not a stroke better.

Everyone, including the Athenians [...] are right to accept advice from anyone, since it is incumbent on everyone to share in that sort of excellence, or else there can be no city at all.

The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the first move-and he, in turn, waits for you.

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word - excellence. To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

Learn the difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection. The first is attainable; the second is not.

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.

When you hold out for high standards, people are impressed-but they don't always like you for it. Not everybody will be on your side in your struggle to do what's right and ethical. In fact, sometimes even you won't be on your side. You'll wrestle with inner conflict, torn between what you should do and what you want to do. You'll also aggravate other people. Seems when you walk the straight and narrow you always step on someone's toes. Don't count on the ethics of excellence to make you popular.

Dancing is an excellent amusement for young people, especially for those of sedentary occupations. Its excellence consists in exciting a cheerfulness of the mind, highly essential to health; in bracing the muscles of the body, and in producing copious perspiration.....The body must perspire, or must be out of order.

Delaware State has established itself as an institution of excellence in its own right and attracts a diversity of students from various races, socio-economic status and locations.

When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.

Does Christ get a good reputation because of the way we live? Is the excellence of Christ displayed in our lives? That should matter to us, not whether we ourselves are praised.

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

The heart of human excellence often begins to beat when you discover a pursuit that absorbs you, frees you, challenges you, or gives you a sense of meaning, joy, or passion.

The principal industrial excellence of the English people lay in their capacity of present exertion for a distant object.

When [the saints] perform actions to God, then the soul says: 'Oh! that I could do what pleases God!' When they come to suffer any cross: 'Oh, that what God does might please me!' I labour to do what pleases God, and I labour that what God does shall please me: here is a Christian indeed, who shall endeavour both these. It is but one side of a Christian to endeavour to do what pleases God; you must as well endeavour to be pleased with what God does, and so you will come to be a complete Christian when you can do both, and that is the first thing in the excellence of this grace of contentment.

Passion is a product of the heart. Passion is what helps you when you have a great dream. Passion breeds conviction and turns mediocrity into excellence! Your passion will motivate others to join you in pursuit of your dream. With passion, you will overcome insurmountable obstacles. You will become unstoppable!

But God, who is the Eternal Mind, is undoubtedly of excellence, complete and perfect in every part.

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

There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?

My theory of self-made men is, then, simply this; that they are men of work. Whether or not such men have acquired material, moral or intellectual excellence, honest labor faithfully, steadily and persistently pursued, is the best, if not the only, explanation of their success... All human experience proves over and over again, that any success which comes through meanness, trickery, fraud and dishonour, is but emptiness and will only be a torment to its possessor.

Once you decide that mediocrity is unthinkable, your only choices are excellence and quitting.

Excellence is not an art. It is the habit of practice.

I cannot see why a taste for the country should be held so very indispensable a requisite for excellence; but really people talk of it as if it were a virtue, and as if an opposite opinion was, to say the least of it, very immoral.

One has to endure betrayal and disloyalty and, hardest of all , another person's excellence of character or intellect

Screw-ups are the mark of excellence.

You can get people the qualifications; But you can't teach them the qualities they're going to need. You can't teach integrity, a drive for excellence, refusal to quit under pressure. It's too late to build that into people you're going to hire.

Excellence is a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.

Demand perfection of yourself and you'll seldom attain it. Fear of making a mistake is the biggest single cause of making one. Relax - pursue excellence, not perfection.

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.

Don't strive to be perfect. Strive for excellence.

Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.

Excellence does not begin in Washington.

I would say that the quality of each man's life is the full measure of that man's commitment of excellence and victory - whether it be football, whether it be business, whether it be politics or government or what have you.

A centre of excellence is, by definition, a place where second class people may perform first class work.

Chastity is the lily of virtues, and makes men almost equal to Angels. Everything is beautiful in accordance with its purity. Now the purity of man is chastity, which is called honesty, and the observance of it, honor and also integrity; and its contrary is called corruption; in short, it has this peculiar excellence above the other virtues, that it preserves both soul and body fair and unspotted.

'Dance to the Music' was just Sly Stone being his natural crazy self right from the beginning. The man was an original and his first AM hit was nothing if it wasn't the example per excellence of the Sly Stone music machine.

It is only through raising expectations and striving for excellence that our children can reach their full potential.

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