Quotes About Excellence

The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.

To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society is to encourage excellence. But giving in to the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford, and the unintentional are those who do not wish to guide their own destinies.

Wealth does not bring excellence, but that wealth comes from excellence.

No good government can ever want more than two things for its support: 1st, Its own excellence; and, 2dly, a people sufficiently instructed, to be aware of that excellence. Every other pretended support, must ultimately tend to its subversion, by lessening its dependence upon these.

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.

Many people can reach for and achieve excellence. To do this consistently is what separates masters and geniuses from everyone else.

There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.

Great teachers and schools expect and nurture quality work and quality performance. Great teachers inspire and demand quality, ever urging their students to higher levels of excellence. They shun mere conformity and expect their students to think and perform to their ever-increasing potential.

Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

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

Nutritional excellence is the only real fountain of youth.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

Christians should ultimately do everything that we do with excellence. There's a story about repairs in the Sistine Chapel ... when some repair work was being done the craftsmen saw that the work on the other side of the plaster, the part not visible to the human eye was done with the same kind of craftsmanship that was done on what was visible and observable. And the explanation for that is that the work that Christians do is not just for human consumption, but it is also for the eyes of God.

It takes more energy to maintain mediocrity than it takes to pursue excellence.

To suppose universal laws of nature capable of being apprehended by the mind and yet having no reason for their special forms, but standing inexplicable and irrational, is hardly a justifiable position. Uniformities are precisely the sort of facts that need to be accounted for. Law is par excellence the thing that wants a reason. Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.

What house, bloated with luxury, ever became prosperous without a woman's excellence?

The good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties. This exercise must occupy a complete lifetime. One swallow does make a spring, nor does one fine day. Excellence is a habit, not an event.

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.

Lack of respect for the worker. This nourishes disconnection, fear, anger, phoniness, and all the bad stuff that impedes excellence.

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

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.

If you ever come to one of my seminars, you will notice I have volunteer workers. When I work with individuals like that, I expect a level of excellence displayed. Everything has to be done perfectly.

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

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

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.

Aspire greatly; anything less than a commitment to excellence becomes an acceptance of mediocrity.

It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.

All excellence is equally difficult.

Excellence - Take what you have and do the BEST with it.

I was raised to believe that excellence is the best deterrent to racism or sexism. And that's how I operate my life.

Parents have to understand, that even if their child isn't showing athletic excellence in a certain sport, they still need to be involved. They don't need to be involved in a military type of setting, they just need to get out and play and enjoy themselves and find it themselves.

You don't have to be really good anymore to get good results. What's happening with Chess is that it's gradually losing its place as the par excellence of intellectual activity. Smart people in search of a challenging board game might try a game called Go.

Excellence or virtue in a man will be the disposition which renders him a good man and also which will cause him to perform his function well.

In the Cross is salvation; in the Cross is life; in the Cross is protection against our enemies; in the Cross is infusion of heavenly sweetness; in the Cross is strength of mind; in the Cross is joy of spirit; in the Cross is excellence of virtue; in the Cross is perfection of holiness. There is no salvation of soul, nor hope of eternal life, save in the Cross.

I know you won't believe me, but the highest form of Human Excellence is to question oneself and others.

The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it.

There is no excellence anywhere without labor. We would think a man foolish indeed who would say, "I am willing that my business should prosper, or that my farm should yield plentifully, but I'll not stir a peg." But he is no more foolish than the man who says, "I am willing that God should bless me abundantly, but I shall not do anything toward that end myself." We must consistently rely upon the help of the Lord, but we will not make any progress or meet with any success unless we put forth an earnest effort.

I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

Hey, size works against excellence.

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

When a man appreciates only eating and sleeping, what excellence has he over the reptiles?

Those who serve upon our juries have maintained a standard of fairness and excellence and demonstrated a vision toward the administration of justice that is a wellspring of inspiration.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

There is no excellence uncoupled with difficulties.

Hang on the walls of your mind the memory of your successes. Take counsel of your strength, not your weakness. Think of the good jobs you have done. For whenever excellence is recounted, it is increased.

[W]hat counts is that one perceives excellence and dares to give it expression, which sounds little but is in fact a great deal.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.