Quotes About Standards

One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best.

In art the best is good enough.

I have principles in my professional and personal life as to how things are done.

Self worth sets the standard that life meets.

The standards of judgment must be rooted in the whys and wherefores of life as it is lived, the world as it is, not our wished-for fantasy of the world as it should be.

Yes, too much emphasis is put on outward physical attributes in every area of American life.

I'm not interested in a marketable product: I'm interested in what I know from my life experience to be standards of excellence

You know, I spend most of my life turning things down. There's a lot of crap out there.

If you are going to live life on your own terms, there need to be terms, and somehow you need to live up to them.

The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court... the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.

Now is the time to set your life's goals. Now is the time to set your standards firmly and then hold to them throughout your life.

I wouldn't wear tiny amounts of clothing in my real life so I don't think it's necessary to wear that stuff in photo-shoots.

It really bothers me how in books it seems like the only two choices are perfection or self-hatred.

Excellence always sells

Thus the Mormon dilemma: Outside the Church is no salvation,' yet inside the Church there is no hope either, for no one who is honest with himself could ever pretend to meet its impossible standards of personal righteousness.

Scientists at MIT and engineering schools all across America say that they could improve the fuel economy standards for the existing set of vehicles by 10 miles per gallon using existing technology, without compromising safety or comfort at all.

The problem is, is that President Bush and the Republican leadership in the Congress have resisted attempts to increase dramatically our fuel economy standards over the last five years.

To make the State your god is to worship an idol, for the State is a man-made creation arising naturally out of tribal communion; but the soul, if such there be, is a god-made miracle and above all national or patriotic standards – the supreme and eternal reality.

Things we conceal from others are insecurities that we are ashamed to admit, feelings and impulses we consider to be anti-social or inconsistent with our self-image, memories of events where we failed or performed badly against our own standards, and, most important, reactions to other people that we judge would be impolite or hurtful to reveal to their face.

It is hardly respectable to be good nowadays.

I like to read great books not because I'm hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won't be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.

No woman can be too rich or too thin.

Among the extremely diverse books lumped together as 'mysteries,' I shall try to judge each fairly according to the best standards of the type which the author intended to produce.

I prefer my saints to live in caves and not to try to impose their standards on the world: for single-mindedness is a cold virtue.