Quotes About Excellence

When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best -- that is inspiration.

Faultless to a fault.

Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less than your best.

Whatever else a TODO might be, it is not an excuse to leave bad code in the system.

FUNCTIONS SHOULD DO ONE THING. THEY SHOULD DO IT WELL. THEY SHOULD DO IT ONLY.

How can we make sure we wind up behind the right door when the going gets tough? The answer is: craftsmanship.

God is in the details, said the architect Ludwig mies van der Rohe.

A craftsman is someone who works quickly, but without rushing, who provides reasonable estimates and meets commitments. A craftsman knows when to say no, but tries hard to say yes. A craftsman is a professional.

There is no such thing as quick and dirty. Anything dirty is slow. The only way to go fast, is to go well.

Professionals are often heroes, but not because they try to be. Professionals become heroes when they get a job done well, on time, and on budget.

It is not enough for code to work.

The only way to go fast, is to go well.

Todo lo que es gratuito es peligroso, ya que por lo general implica alguna treta o un compromiso oculto. Las cosas que tienen costo valen la pena pagarse. De esta manera, no estará obligado a gratitud alguna, se verá libre de culpa y evitará fraudes y engaños. Lo más inteligente es, a menudo, pagar el precio total. Cuando hablamos de excelencia no hay gangas. Sea generoso con su dinero y hágalo circular, dado que la generosidad es señal e imán de poder.

Do not overstep your bounds. Do what you are assigned to do, to the best of your abilities, and never do more. To think that by doing more you are doing better is a common blunder. It is never good to seem to be trying too hard—it is as if you were covering up some deficiency. Fulfilling a task that has not been asked of you just makes people suspicious. If you are a crown-keeper, be a crown-keeper. Save your excess energy for when you are not in the court.

But Masters inevitably possess another quality that complicates the work process: They are not easily satisfied by what they are doing. While able to feel excitement, they also feel doubt about the worthiness of their work. They have high internal standards. As they progress, they begin to detect flaws and difficulties in their original idea that they had not foreseen.

I had much rather be confined to one element, and be admired in that, than be a goose in all!

Excellent. I approve of statesmen who write philosophy. It means they have given up all hope of power.

Leaving something unfinished was nearly as bad as messing up the details.

and when he sat against trees to catch his breath he marveled at how full life felt when a person got to be excellent

Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality.

What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.

A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristics of Quality

You've got to live right too. It's the way you live that predisposes you to avoid the traps and see the right facts. You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It's easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.