Quotes About Excellence

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.

As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.

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.

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.

The value of work, and of always learning something new, and what it takes to achieve excellence. I really believe in those things that you have to dedicate yourself and spend time, that excellence is elusive. It's a little maddening, to try to have that level of discipline in your life, and I don't succeed all the time. But I do try.

There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don't know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.

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.

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.

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.

Most important of all, to be successful in life demands that a man make a personal commitment to excellence and to victory, even though the ultimate victory can never be completely won. Yet that victory might be pursued and wooed with every fiber of our body, with every bit of our might and all our effort. And each week, there is a new encounter; each day, there is a new challenge.

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

I believe excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over.

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.

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour.

The quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence.

I hope to be remembered as an author who defined and exemplified excellence in crafting the modern love story.

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.

Dostoevsky believed that the gods of rationalism and materialist utilitarianism had joined in conspiracy against all other ethical systems. ... The accumulation of capital, or the acquisition of money, are endeavors par excellence which establish a quantifiable goal: hence they are directly amenable to maximization formulae.

The public, as a whole, finds reassurance in longevity, and, after the necessary interlude of reaction, is disposed to recognize extreme old age as a sign of excellence. The long-liver has triumphed over at least one of man's initial handicaps: the brevity of life.

Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so?

Honor is truly sacred, but holds a lower rank in the scale of moral excellence than virtue. Indeed the former is part of the latter, and consequently has not equal pretensions to support a frame of government productive of human happiness.

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

Anyone who has achieved excellence in any form knows that it comes as a result of ceaseless concentration.

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

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.

Excellence means representing the reputation of Christ well. It means doing all things as best as you can...

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

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.

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

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

Always aim at perfection for only then will you achieve excellence

Excellence has no sex.

It is most certainly a good thing that the world knows only the beautiful opus but not its origins, not the conditions of its creation; for if people knew the sources of the artist's inspiration, that knowledge would often confuse them, alarm them, and thereby destroy the effects of excellence. strange hours! strangely enervating labor! bizarrely fertile intercourse of the mind with a body!

She [Evelina] is not, indeed, like most modern young ladies; to be known in half an hour; her modest worth, and fearful excellence, require both time and encouragement to show themselves.

Pursue excellence; ignore success.

I work hard and I have a standard of excellence - and I expect everyone at the Interior Department to meet that same standard. I delegate a lot. I might appear to be doing a lot of different things, but there's a strong team helping me. I believe we're going to have the strongest team of any agency in the Obama administration.

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

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

The fact that my songs take a long time to write is no guarantee of their excellence.

Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.

There is no excellence in archery without great labour.

Personal development is your springboard to personal excellence. Ongoing, continuous, non-stop personal development literally assures you that there is no limit to what you can accomplish.

We need excellence in public education and if the teachers can't do it, we'll send in a couple of policemen.

In seasons of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness.

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style; in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity.

You've got to do some work now. Make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue. Virtue is about moral excellence.

Each of us, if we would grow, must be committed to excellence. The championships, the money, the color; all of these things linger only in the memory. It is the spirit, the will to excel, the will to win; these are the things that endure.