Quotes About Excellence

Education to perfect gentlemanship, to human excellence, liberal education consists in reminding oneself of human excellence, of human greatness.

In a person's career, well, if you're process-oriented and not totally outcome-oriented, then you're more likely to be success. I often say 'pursue excellence, ignore success.' Success is a by-product of 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.

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.

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.

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.

When you have a spirit of excellence, you do the right thing not because somebody is watching or making you do it; you do it because it's the right thing to do.

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.

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.

The potential of this nation is as boundless as the imagination and drive of the American people. . . . Quality management is not just a step. It must be a new style of working. Even a new style of thinking. The dedication to quality and excellence is more than good business; it's a way of life.

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.

It is called the real presence, not in an exclusive sense, as though other forms of presence were not real, but by reason of its excellence. It is the substantial presence by which Christ is made present without doubt, whole and entire, God and man.

The power of excellence is overwhelming. It is always in demand, and nobody cares about its color.

Life is teleology par excellence; it is the intrinsic striving towards a goal, and the living organism is a system of directed aims which seek to fulfill themselves.

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

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

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.

Television is by nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, uniformity of content, repeatability of content make it inevitably a tool of coersion, brainwashing, and manipulation.

A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle. life with ups and downs is better than a flat life or one that goes in circles. Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.

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.

Every successive generation becomes a living memorial of our public schools, and a living example of their excellence.

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

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

You cannot learn very much about excellence from studying failure.

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

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

I wished that my job was baking muffins in a muffin shop, where all I'd have to do was crack eggs and measure flour and make change, and nobody could abuse me, and where they'd even expect me to be fat. Every flab roll and cellulite crinkle would serve as testimony to the excellence of my baked goods

The standard is the standard and whomever walks in the door at the time I need a person in that position who can do that job with excellence and who understands my vision, if they can fulfill it, they got the job whether they're young, old, black, white, male or female.

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.

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

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.

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

Excellence does not begin in Washington.

Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only what your strengths and weaknesses are but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve true excellence.

I think the challenges for me was to go into the studio with these incredible jazz players and come up to their level of excellence. That's always a challenge.

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort or safety.

Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude

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?

Form, which should be the clean - cut expression of mechanical excellence has become sensuous and organic.

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.

The excellence of a thing is related to its proper function.

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. 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 in poetry.

Relentlessly pursue perfection knowing we won't catch it, but in the process we'll achieve excellence.

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.

Excellence isn't achieved without inspiration and perspiration. You've got to have both.

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.