Quotes About Excellence

Excellence is doing a common thing in an uncommon way.

I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy.

be the best loved who have contributed most to

The conviction that a law of necessity governs human activities introduces into our conception of man and life a mildness, a reverence and an excellence, such as would be unattainable without this conviction.

What's the good of a philosophy with a major premise that isn't the rationalization of your feelings? If you've never had a religious experience, it's folly to believe in God. You might as well believe in the excellence of oysters, when you can't eat them without being sick.

But that doesn't seem enough. It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Able," was the verdict of his superiors. "Perhaps," (and they would shake their heads, would significantly lower their voices) "a little too able.

It's not enough for the phrases to be good; what you make with them ought to be good too.

Being simply "better than average" is not good enough. You have to be head and shoulders above the crowd to win a minus-sum game.

The important thing is to carry on doing what you're doing,' she said. 'And not to do what you think other people think you should do. You should do what you do as well as you possibly can.

Love of what you do is unmistakable in the care with which you do it, whether it is seen in the way in which an artist applies the final touch of paint to his canvas, a master carpenter sands the last touch of roughness from the surface of the wood, or a woman making pasta kneads the compliant dough, draws it out, coaxes it to the right consistency.

Great people only thank you for doing the impossible; what's possible, they say they can effect themselves.

The definition of a strength that we will use throughout this book is quite specific: consistent near perfect performance in an activity.

Skills are so enticingly helpful that they obscure their two flaws. The first flaw is that while skills will help you perform, they will not help you excel.

The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.

Our definition of a weakness is anything that gets in the way of excellent performance.

Your performance depends on your people. Select the best, train them and back them. When errors occur, give sharper guidance. If errors persist or if the fit feels wrong, help them move on. The country cannot afford amateur hour in the White House.

Higher education is one of few areas where this country competes with the rest of the world and wins. The best of American higher education outstrips any in the world. Look where the rest of the world goes for higher education, for graduate degrees. They come here.

More and more it seems to me that about the best thing in life is to have a piece of work worth doing and then to do it well.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

There is only one real sin, and that is to persuade oneself that the second-best is anything but the second-best

Success, for any sane adult, is exactly equivalent to doing one's best. What that best may be, what its farthest reaches may include, we can discover only by freeing ourselves completely from the Will to Fail.

If someone else does excellently in the line you had dreamed of for yourself, you can always believe that, if you had really tried again, you could have surpassed him.

Whatever the ostensible purpose may be, it is plain that one motive is at work in all these cases: the intention, often unconscious, to fill life so full of secondary activities or substitute activities that there will be no time in which to perform the best work of which one is capable. The intention, in short, is to fail.