Quotes About Excellence

If you want excellence, you must aim at perfection. It makes you go into detail that you can avoid. It takes a lot of energy out of you but that's the only way you finally actually achieve excellence. So in that sense, being finicky is essential.

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.

Excellence is not an aspiration. Excellence is what you do in the next five minutes.

Most people are too busy working on insignificant projects and pursuing life's frivolities to tap their creative abilities. It's a mistake to be one of them. Striving for excellence where excellence doesn't matter is the stuff misfits are made of.

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 have not made cricket and football [soccer] professional because of any astonishing avarice or new vulgarity. We have made them professional because we would have them perfect. We have dedicated men to them as to some god of inhuman excellence. We care more for football than for the fun of playing football.

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.

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

The Dark Side of the Moon has flash - the true flash that comes from the excellence of a superb performance.

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.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

Men are in the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly quite as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded.

Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance.

The ethics of excellence requires a sense of perspective. Look at the big picture. If you live for the moment you might mortgage the future? What happens if you put your reputation at risk and lose the bet?

I was brought up on choirs and brass bands. They formed the music of my childhood. When I heard the Treorchy Male Choir at the Royal Variety Performance it brought back such happy memories. You have your own eminent place in the history of British music. You stand for excellence in a great tradition and your work for charity is both an example and an inspiration.

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best.

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.

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.

Dreams can become a reality when we possess a vision that is characterized by the willingness to work hard, a desire for excellence, and a belief in our right and our responsiblity to be equal members of society.

Strive for excellence in your calling, but as a subsidiary to this: Do not fail to enrich your whole capital as man. To be a giant, and not a dwarf in your profession, you must always be growing. The man that has ceased to go up intellectually has begun to go down.

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.

I demand excellence from the people I work with.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.

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

If we state the function of man to be a certain kind of life, and this to be an activity or actions of the soul implying a rational principle, and the function of a good man to be the good and noble performance of these, and if any action is well performed when it is performed in accordance with the appropriate excellence human good turns out to be activity of the soul in accordance with virtue, and if there are more than one virtue, in accordance with the best and most complete.

We have different forms assigned to us in the school of life, different gifts imparted. All is not attractive that is good. Iron is useful, though it does not sparkle like the diamond. Gold has not the fragrance of a flower. So different persons have various modes of excellence, and we must have an eye to all.

Aspire greatly; anything less than a commitment to excellence becomes an acceptance of mediocrity.

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.

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.

I don't think about being male or female, I just behave naturally. I think in terms of excellence in science, not gender.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Individual efforts can bring excellence but only collective efforts can deliver effectively.

I think there's inherently an issue that models will literally never be able to handle, which is that when somebody comes along with a new way of doing something that's really excellent, the models will not recognize it. They only know how to recognize excellence when they can measure it somehow.

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.

It's just really about trying to do whatever it is I do at a level of excellence. That's really all I'm trying to do while I'm here.

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

Believe passionately in what you do, and never knowingly compromise your standards and values. Act like a true professional, aiming for true excellence, and the money will follow.

My new favorite word is 'awkward.'...Th e reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't be worth the effort.

You have to be uncompromised in your level of commitment to whatever you are doing, or it can disappear as fast as it appeared... Excellence isn't a one-week or one-year ideal. It's a constant. There will be days when you don't feel on top of your game, or meetings in which you aren't at your best, but your commitment remains constant. No compromises.

I think that we already have a really good system in town, but I have a vision that it could be even better. My vision is that academic excellence is the area that we should pursue more, coupled with fiscal discipline.

I imagine a school system that recognizes learning is natural, that a love of learning is normal, and that real learning is passionate learning. A school curriculum that values questions above answers...creativity above fact regurgitation...individuality above conformity.. and excellence above standardized performance..... And we must reject all notions of 'reform' that serve up more of the same: more testing, more 'standards', more uniformity, more conformity, more bureaucracy.

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence.

Universities have failed in their function of the pursuit of academic excellence by having dumbed down classes and granting degrees to students who are just barely literate and computationally incompetent.

When a man appreciates only eating and sleeping, what excellence has he over the reptiles?

The education of attention would be an education par excellence

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.