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.

If happiness is activity in accordance with excellence, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest excellence.

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.

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.

Excellence demands that you be better than yourself.

When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

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.

I have tried to emphasize to people that, hey, just like President Obama was a really good president, and the fact that he was black I think was historic and unprecedented, but he also claimed and owned his excellence, and that's why I'm saying, okay - I think it's really exciting and historic that I would be the first woman president, but I have a lot of work I want to do. And I hope that people will say, "Hey, she's getting it done." That's how I think about it.

I believe that Silicon Valley is truly a place of excellence and the impact of this tiny community on the world is completely disproportionate to its size. We are the undisputed leaders of technological change. But with our abundance of talent and resources, we also have the opportunity to be the pioneers of social change and, ultimately, this may be our greatest contribution.

The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying.

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.

While dwelling with pleasing satisfaction upon the superior excellence of our political institutions, let us not be unmindful that liberty is power; that the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth, and that the tenure of power by man is, in the moral purposes of his Creator, upon condition that it shall be exercised to ends of beneficence, to improve the condition of himself and his fellow men.

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.

The Grammys are supposed to be awards for artistic excellence… Iggy Azalea’s not excellent.

Excellence isn't a one-week or one-year ideal. It's a constant.

Don’t tolerate any form of average. Don’t accept Dis-excellence. Don’t stand for mediocre. If you’re going to settle, then please settle for the absolute best.

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.

We should give the Lord the excellence He deserves in everything we do.

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

Norwich is a fine city. None finer. If there is another city in the United Kingdom with a school of painters named after it, a matchless modern art gallery, a university with a reputation for literary excellence which can boast Booker Prize-winning alumni, one of the grandest Romanesque cathedrals in the world, and an extraordinary new state-of-the-art library then I have yet to hear of it.

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

Find something that you're really interested in doing in your life. Pursue it, set goals, and commit yourself to excellence. Do the best you can.

Creativity is a distinctive trait of human excellence in all domains of behavior.

Excellence in life seems to me to be the way in which each human being makes the most of the adventure of living and becomes most truly and deeply himself, fulfilling his own nature in the context of a good life with other people.

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

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.

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

If a team cannot perform with excellence at a moment's notice, they probably will fail in the long run.

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.

I think everyone is their harshest critic, but I strive for excellence as much as I can because I think it shows.

Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own

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.

Always aim at perfection for only then will you achieve excellence

The media and their journalists are merely megaphones for stupidity, the verb par excellence.

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers.

Excellence is a signal to God that we are going to dig our ditches but if You don't make it rain, all of this is a waste of time.

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.

Excellence nourishes the soul.

I'm speaking of the pursuit of excellence in all things. All things! Presence of mind and devotion to craft. A great artist has these. A great chef. A great master of tea. There's powerful kung fu in a well-built house or an eloquent letter, but the limit of your imagination is bones breaking and bullets flying.

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

I predict a long reign ahead of you. Years of being referred to as Your Majesty, Your Grace, Your Excellence, My Liege, My Queen, My Lovely.” “I don’t think that last one is a formal title,” I said. “It should be.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which highlights customer satisfaction, workforce empowerment, and increased productivity, has come to symbolize America's commitment to excellence.

There is no excellence uncoupled with difficulties.

Excellence in health means devoting your life to ending poverty.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

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.