Quotes About Excellence

The things that people do now in sports, you can't even believe. These are complete total athletes. To see what human beings can do in the highest level is amazing.

To be amazing means you have to do amazing things.

The preserver of abundance is excellence.

Such an attitude does not come from technique or technology. It does not come from education; in more than two decades in universities I have rarely seen it. It does not come even from principle. It comes from a passion that is culturally prepared—a passion for excellence and order that is handed down to young people by older people whom they respect and love. When we destroy the possibility of that succession, we will have gone far toward destroying ourselves.

What is the effect on quantity of persuading a producer to produce an inferior product? What, in other words, is the relation of pride or craftsmanship to abundance? That is another question the "agribusinessmen" and their academic collaborators do not ask. They do not ask it because they are afraid of the answer: The preserver of abundance is excellence.

You have a responsibility to act for others when you're the only person in a position to do so. It's how you handle it that separates the great from the mediocre.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions;[69] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit;

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; "these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions";50 we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:

we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions;[69] we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit; the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life;... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.

One proof of the excellence of this amiable woman's character is that all who loved her loved each other, even jealousy and rivalry submitting to the more powerful sentiment with which she inspired them; and I never saw any of those who surrounded her entertain the least ill will among themselves. Let the reader pause a moment in this encomium, and if he can recollect any other woman who deserves it, let him attach himself to her if he would obtain happiness.

What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none.

to inherit or develop standards of excellence and taste. As this majority grows it acts as a cultural drag upon the minority; its ways of speech, dress, recreation, feeling, judgment, and thought spread upward, and internal barbarization by the majority is part of the price that the minority pays for its control of educational and economic opportunity.

We please others best-and best satisfy ourselves-only when we have done our own job fully and thus fulfilled our own potential.

our students should be playing Beethoven with research processes, but instead we are hearing Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Boys, be ambitious. Be ambitious not for money, not for selfish aggrandizement, not for the evanescent thing which men call fame. Be ambitious for the attainment of all that a man can be.

There is a man who has won the decathlon of human existence."*

Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.

Tokyu Hands assumes that the customer is very serious about something. If that happens to be shining a pair of shoes, and the customer is sufficiently serious about it, he or she may need the very best German sole-edge enamel available—for the museum-grade weekly restoration of the sides of the soles.

she was, through no real faults of her own, perfect.

Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

Professionalism is not sportsmanship. If you don't succeed, you won't be in your profession for long. In our society, it's not about good or bad. It's about who's on top.

The man of first rate excellence is virtuous in spite of instruction; he of the middle class is so after instruction; the lowest order of men are vicious in spite of instruction.

The singer should sing well even if it is merely to himself, rather than dance badly for the whole world.

He summarizes his approach to change in this simple phrase (inspired by Aristotle's "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."): "We are what we practice and we're always practicing something. Thus, to make changes we need to practice something new and different.