Quotes About Excellence

We can't achieve excellence through talent alone. Or merely by making technological improvements. We can't even buy our way to excellence, no matter how much money we have available to spend. More dollars will never do it. We have to develop a strong corporate conscience. Ethical muscle. And that doesn't happen by accident either.

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.

I often say 'pursue excellence, ignore success.' Success is a by-product of excellence.

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!

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.

If you truly expect to realize your dreams, abandon the need for blanket approval. If conforming to everyone's expectations is the number one goal, you have sacrificed your uniqueness, and therefore your excellence.

All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose.

Mistakes are a natural part of growing up. They're to be expected and made light of. But children bloom like spring flowers under praise. They want so much to be noticed and appreciated, to excel and have that excellence noticed.

Conscience, the sense of right, the power of perceiving moral distinctions, the power of discerning between justice and injustice, excellence and baseness, is the highest faculty given us by God, the whole foundation of our responsibility, and our sole capacity for religion. ...God, in giving us conscience, has implanted a principle within us which forbids us to prostrate ourselves before mere power, or to offer praise where we do not discover worth.

When you begin moving toward excellence, you will find very little competition. You're competing with only 20% of the population.

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

You are what you do repeatedly every day. If excellence is something you're striving for, then it's not an accident. It's a habit.

Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.

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.

A man's excellence is like that of water; It benefits all things without striving; It takes to the low places shunned by men. Water is akin to Tao. . . . In all the earth nothing weaker than water, Yet in attacking the hard, nothing superior, Nothing so certain in wearing down strength: There is no way to resist it. Note then: The weak conquer the strong, The yielding outlast the aggressors.

How seek the way which leadeth to our wishes? By renouncing our wishes. The crown of excellence is renunciation.

I didn't have friends. No one talked to me. I used to go to the Wyndcroft School (nationally recognized for academic excellence) in Pottstown, and when I moved to Wyomissing, I didn't know anybody.

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?

The more we sympathize with excellence, the more we go out of self, the more we love, the broader and deeper is our personality.

Education, they [philosophers] felt, is the only answer to the always pressing question, to the political question par excellence, of how to reconcile order which is not oppression with freedom which is not license.

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.

Even though . . . 9/11 happened because . . . Bush's FBI and CIA did not detect the Al Qaeda conspiracy . . . , Bush not only failed to apologize to the nation or the victims' survivors, he demonstrated his total lack of leadership by refusing to fire or even criticize those in these agencies who, like Bush, let this nation down. As in private life, to stimulate excellence, good performances have to be rewarded and gross negligence and incompetence punished.

The same man cannot well be skilled in everything; each has his special excellence.

You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.

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.

In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. Perhaps, then you might gain that great tranquility that comes from knowing that you've had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

The future is too soon the past. So make perseverance your excellence and go confidently in the direction of your dreams.

If a team cannot perform with excellence at a moment's notice, they probably will fail in the long run.

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

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.

Excellence is not an accomplishment. It is a spirit, a never-ending process.

If we are to keep our flock at the highest pitch of excellence, there should be as many unions of the best of both sexes, and as few of the inferior as possible, and that only the offspring of the better unions should be kept.

Excellence is a choice, and you must make that choice over and over again until "doing your best" is all you know.

Wisdom is not finally tested in schools, Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not having it, Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content, Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things; Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.

Hey, size works against excellence.

What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?

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.

Excellence is a signal to God that we are going to dig our ditches but if You don't make it rain, all of this is a waste of time.

Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.

We clamor for equality chiefly in matters in which we ourselves cannot hope to obtain excellence.

I look at my kids, who were born under a Black president, who hop around the living room naked and joyful, mimicking Simone Biles, and just think, Damn, they got some amazing role models of Black excellence.

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

By education I mean that training in excellence from youth upward which makes a man passionately desire to be a perfect citizen, and teaches him to rule, and to obey, with justice. This is the only education which deserves the name.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

Of cases where a man is truthful both in speech and conduct when no considerations of honesty come in, from an habitual sincerity of disposition. Such sincerity may be esteemed a moral excellence; for the lover of truth, who is truthful even when nothing depends on it, will a fortiori be truthful when some interest is at stake, since having all along avoided falsehood for its own sake, he will assuredly avoid it when it is morally base; and this is a disposition that we praise.

The lesbian is the archtypical feminist, because she's not into men - she's the independent woman par excellence.