Quotes About Excellence

Perfectionism is the counterfeit of excellence. Excellence is Kingdom, while perfectionism is religion. What ever you do, do it with all you might, and as unto the Lord. That is 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.

I am inspired by the professionalism of others. I believe there is an obligation to strive for excellence in what one is asked to do. No pains are too great, no revisions too tedious no matter how small the result. But I also believe that while humility should not be overdone, excellence should never be taken for granted, otherwise we stop reaching for it.

Success is about having, excellence is about being. Success is about having money and fame, but excellence is being the best you can be.

There is definitely a connection between finding your passion and reaching your potential. People ask me all the time, 'John, how do I know what I am meant to do in life?' The answer is really simple: Energy and Excellence. When you experience unbounded energy in what you are doing, when you are driven to excellence in your work and love what you do - then you can rest assured that you have found your passion and are definitely in pursuit of your full potential.

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.

We are not being true to the artist as a man if we consider his art work junk simply because we differ with his outlook on life. Christian schools, Christian parents, and Christian pastors often have turned off young people at just this point. Because the schools, the pastors, and the parents did not make a distinction between technical excellence and content, the whole of much great art has been rejected with scorn and ridicule. Instead, if the artist's technical excellence is high, he is to be praised for this, even if we differ with his world view. Man must be treated fairly as man.

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 thing that keeps a business ahead of the competition is excellence in execution.

I am very pleased with the progress of the new CBS Corporation. The Company's rapid pace of change and innovative approach to emerging business opportunities can be seen in the many strategic announcements we have made over these past few months. The more focused and more nimble organization we sought to create has become a reality and that aggressive spirit of excellence and innovation will continue to benefit shareholders for many years to come.

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.

In peace-armies discipline meant the hunt, not of an average but of an absolute; the hundred per cent standard in which the ninety-nine were played down to the level of the weakest man on parade.... The deeper the discipline, the lower was the individual excellence; also the more sure the performance.

Lead the people with administrative injunctions and put them in their place with penal law, and they will avoid punishments but will be without a sense of shame. Lead them with excellence and put them in their place through roles and ritual practices, and in addition to developing a sense of shame, they will order themselves harmoniously

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

There's no such thing as Perfection. But, in striving for perfection, we can achieve excellence.

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

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.

The happy life is thought to be one of excellence; now an excellent life requires exertion, and does not consist in amusement.

The excellence of the Church does not consist in multitude but in purity.

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

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

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow. Every job is a self portrait of the person who did it ... Autograph your work with excellence.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

Trying to do well and trying to beat others are two different things. Excellence and victory are conceptually distinct . . . and are experienced differently.

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

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.

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?

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.

I want to explore and do things with excellence. I want to write songs that resonate with me and will resonate with a live audience. I'm exploring fresh sounds.

I will not go so far as to say, with a living poet, that the world knows nothing of its greatest men; but there are forms of greatness, or at least of excellence, which "die and make no sign"; there are martyrs that miss the palm, but not the stake; heroes without the laurel, and conquerors without the triumph.

whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.

A Leader must possess credibility, imagination, enthusiasm, vision, foresight, a sense of timing, a passion for excellence and be willing to share.

An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.

Aspiration lifts the life; groveling lowers it. When we are striving for excellence in everything we do the entire life grows and expands, but if we allow our standards to drop, there is a natural progression that follows, a tendency for a downward effort in all that we do thereafter.

There are many aspects about what and why we photograph: visual pleasure, personal empathy, intellectual stimulation, technical excellence, etc. Serious photographers and artists will try to create works that are original. Over a career period they may develop a singular identity in their images.

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.

A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition.

The total mental efficiency of a man is the resultant of the working together of all his faculties. He is too complex a being for any one of them to have the casting vote. If any one of them do have the casting vote, it is more likely to be the strength of his desire and passion, the strength of the interest he takes in what is proposed. Concentration, memory, reasoning power, inventiveness, excellence of the senses, all are subsidiary to this.

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.

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.

Commitment is mental determination to accept only EXCELLENCE no matter how difficult, uncomfortable, or stressful.

But when we get enough people who don't care, and who don't accept personal responsibility for high ethical standards, our organization gets the "M" disease. Mediocrity. Anybody in the place can be a carrier. By the same token, every individual can carry the cure: the ethics of excellence.

My path was simple: Follow your passion. Pour in your heart and soul. Settle for nothing less than excellence. And with enough hard work and faith in yourself, you can realize your dream.

If you're studying for an exam you're not thinking about the results. If you're always worried about the results, you can't study a lot. So to be engaged and detached from the outcome is excellent. Excellence is behavior. I mean, isn't that what martial arts is about? And that's what meditation is about, that's what, in many ways, sports are about.

We are seeing some challenges and some changes in American business, American enterprise, but the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is a reminder of things that must never change: the passion for excellence, the drive to innovate, the hard work that goes with any successful enterprise.