Motivational Quotes

Excellence

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

- Watson, Thomas J.

Best Quotes about Excellence

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.

Getty, J. Paul

One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one attempts to the best of one's ability. There is a special sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in its parts, which the superficial person who leaves his or her work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns any work into art. The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement.

Mandino, Og

To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured; to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.

Goldsmith, Oliver

There is a canyon of difference between doing your best to glorify God and doing whatever it takes to glorify yourself. The quest for excellence is a mark of maturity. The quest for power is childish.

Lucado, Max L.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

O'Connor, Flannery

People forget how fast you did a job, but they remember how well you did it.

Newton, Howard W.

Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art -- an individual masterpiece.

Waitley, Denis

There seems to be one quality of mind which seems to be of special and extreme advantage in leading him to make discoveries. It was the power of never letting exceptions go unnoticed.

Darwin, Francis

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

Washington, Booker T.

10.

The most splendid achievement of all is the constant striving to surpass yourself and to be worthy of your own approval.

Waitley, Denis

11.

The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence.

John F. Kennedy

12.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

Maugham, W. Somerset

13.

Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more.

Vickery, A. Lou

14.

Excellence is best described as doing the right things right -- selecting the most important things to be done and then accomplishing them 100% correctly.

15.

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

Mandino, Og

16.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

Hill, Napoleon

17.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

Kingsley, Charles

18.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

Da Vinci, Leonardo

19.

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

Marden, Orison Swett

20.

If you aren't playing well, the game isn't as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.

Watson, Thomas J.

21.

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

Simmons, Charles

22.

Badness you can get easily, in quantity; the road is smooth, and it lies close by, But in front of excellence the immortal gods have put sweat, and long and steer is the way to it.

Hesiod

23.

Make it a life-rule to give your best to whatever passes through your hands. Stamp it with your manhood. Let superiority be your trademark...

Marden, Orison Swett

24.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

Keats, John

25.

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

Roddick, Anita

26.

When you say you'll meet someone at 11:00 AM, be there at 10:45. When you promise a check on the 30th, send it on the 28th. Whatever you agree to do, do it a bit more. Start with your employees, then extend it to everyone you deal with. News will soon get around that you are a person of your word.

Scott, Charles Prestwich

27.

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

Hill, Napoleon

28.

The fact is, the difference between peak performers and everybody else are much smaller than everybody else thinks.

Garfield, Charles A.

29.

Anybody who accepts mediocrity -- in school, on the job, in life -- is a person who compromises, and when the leader compromises, the whole organization compromises.

Knight, Charles

30.

There is no such thing as natural touch. Touch is something you create by hitting millions of golf balls.

Trevino, Lee

31.

There's a way to do better... find it.

Edison, Thomas A.

32.

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled.

Gracian, Baltasar

33.

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

Tracy, Brian

34.

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority...

Marden, Orison Swett

35.

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can reach. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries and predecessors; try to be better than yourself.

36.

I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

You're probably not a member of a major league baseball team, your errors, unless they are truly spectacular, don't show up in the morning paper.

Goodsell, Jane

38.

It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.

Marden, Orison Swett

39.

I use nothing but the best ingredients. My cookies are always baked fresh. I price cookies so that you cannot make them at home for any less. And I still give cookies away.

Fields, Debbie

40.

Strive for excellence, not perfection.

H. Jackson Brown Jr.

41.

The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self improvement, about being better than you were the day before.

Young, Steve

42.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Gardner, John W.

43.

If we want to make something really superb on this planet, there is nothing whatever that can stop us.

Mead, Shepherd

44.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

Gardner, John W.

45.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

Michener, James A.

46.

I always remember an epitaph which is in the cemetery at Tombstone, Arizona. It says: Here lies Jack Williams. He done his damnedest. I think that is the greatest epitaph a man can have.

Truman, Harry S

47.

Doing common things uncommonly well.

Marden, Orison Swett

48.

There never will exist anything permanently noble and excellent in the character which is a stranger to resolute self-denial.

Scott, Sir Walter

49.

Put the uncommon effort into the common task... make it large by doing it in a great way.

Marden, Orison Swett

50.

There is one plain rule of life. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and outward circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it.

Mill, John Stuart