Quotes About Excellence

Gandhi said 'One cannot do right in one area of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in another; Life is one indivisible whole.' This point of wisdom is profound. A commitment to excellence is not just reserved for a few select areas of your life - it must be reflected in everything you do. Your diet must reflect your commitment to excellence. Your physique must reflect your commitment to excellence. Your personal habits must reflect your commitment to excellence and your thoughts must reflect a commitment to excellence.

I would urge that the yeast of education is the idea of excellence, and the idea of excellence comprises as many forms as there are individuals, each of whom develops his own image of excellence. The school must have as one of its principal functions the nurturing of images of excellence.

Nobody I know is as committed to excellence as Donald Palmisano. He symbolizes everything that is good about our country. If Horatio Alger were alive today, heʼd want to be just like Dr. Palmisano, one of the true Renaissance men Iʼve had the privilege and pleasure of knowing! On Leadership continues in his tradition of excellence.

It's like this, I think: the excellence of a good body doesn't make the soul good, but the other way around: the excellence of a good soul makes the body as good as it can be.

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.

Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.

Excellence in one area is the beginning of excellence in every area.

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.

Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives - choice, not chance, determines your destiny.

We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the first move-and he, in turn, waits for you.

People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.

When you hold out for high standards, people are impressed-but they don't always like you for it. Not everybody will be on your side in your struggle to do what's right and ethical. In fact, sometimes even you won't be on your side. You'll wrestle with inner conflict, torn between what you should do and what you want to do. You'll also aggravate other people. Seems when you walk the straight and narrow you always step on someone's toes. Don't count on the ethics of excellence to make you popular.

Dancing is an excellent amusement for young people, especially for those of sedentary occupations. Its excellence consists in exciting a cheerfulness of the mind, highly essential to health; in bracing the muscles of the body, and in producing copious perspiration.....The body must perspire, or must be out of order.

Mediocrity is excellence in the eyes of the mediocre.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

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

Usually I object when someone makes over-much of men's work versus women's work, for I think it is the excellence of the results which counts.

An organization which just perpetuates today's level of vision, excellence, and accomplishment has lost the capacity to adapt.

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

Excellence happens when you try each day to both do and be, a little better than you were yesterday!

It is said that it takes 10,000 hours to develop mastery and excellence. How many hours have you clocked today on your passion?

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.

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.

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that the way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.

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?

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

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

Thomas Jefferson once said: 'Of course the people don't want war. But the people can be brought to the bidding of their leader. All you have to do is tell them they're being attacked and denounce the pacifists for somehow a lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.' I think that was Jefferson. Oh wait. That was Hermann Goering. Shoot." [Hosting the Peabody Awards for broadcasting excellence at the New York Waldorf-Astoria, June 6, 2006]

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments and integrity earn this appellation.

Tis a meaner part of sense to find a fault than taste an excellence.

I demand excellence from the people I work with.

Has your work become very easy? Do you find you can do it with little effort? Has it ceased to impose any strain or fatigue upon you? Do you no longer feel loss of vitality after a long spell of it? Can you now do it as easy as water rolls off a duck's back? If so, look out! Do some stock-taking. Examine your output.... Work done with little effort is likely to yield little result. Every job can be done excellently or indifferently. Excellence necessitates effort-hard, sustained, concentrated effort.

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

I cannot see why a taste for the country should be held so very indispensable a requisite for excellence; but really people talk of it as if it were a virtue, and as if an opposite opinion was, to say the least of it, very immoral.

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.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is a habit.

Basically, to lead without a title is to derive your power within the organisation not from your position but from your competence, effectiveness, relationships, excellence, innovation and ethics.

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.

You can get people the qualifications; But you can't teach them the qualities they're going to need. You can't teach integrity, a drive for excellence, refusal to quit under pressure. It's too late to build that into people you're going to hire.

I just couldn't make the grade as a hack-that, like everything else, requires a certain practiced excellence.

I would say that the quality of each man's life is the full measure of that man's commitment of excellence and victory - whether it be football, whether it be business, whether it be politics or government or what have you.

I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts.

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.

Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude

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.

The habit of excellence can become enjoyably addictive.

Strive for perfection, but settle for excellence.