Excellence
454 quotes: 40 by Keith Craft, 414 from other voices.
Other voices on Excellence
- A constant fidelity in small things is a great and heroic virtue.
- A good imitation is the most perfect originality.
- A good solid bit of work lasts.
- A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.
- A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace.
- A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.
- A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace.
- A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness.
- A prepared mind craves the worst conditions because it knows that pressure brings out its best.
- A professional is one who does his best work when he feels the least like working.
- A really great talent finds its happiness in execution.
- A spark is a molecule of matter, yet may it kindle the world; vast is the mighty ocean, but drops have made it vast. Despise not thou small things, either for evil or for good; for a look may work thy ruin, or a word create thy wealth.
- A star does not compete with other stars around it; it just shines.
- A successful life is nothing more nor less than living as well as we know how and doing the very best that we can.
- Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.
- Above all, don't be satisfied to do only fairly well what ought to be done very well. Someone is going to do it better than anyone else; why not you?Clarence Monroe BookmanSourced
- Aim at least at the perfection of everything that is worth doing at all; and you will come nearer it than you would imagine; but those always crawl infinitely short of it whose aim is only mediocrity.
- Aim at perfection in everything, though in most things it is unattainable; however, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it, than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable.
- Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life.
- All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
- All successful employers of labor are stalking men who will do the unusual, men who think, men who attract attention by performing more than is expected of them.
- Always do your very best. Even when no one else is looking, you always are. Don't disappoint yourself.
- Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
- Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.
- Always stick to what makes you weird, odd, strange, different. That’s your source of power.
- Amateurs blame others. Professionals accept responsibility.
- Amateurs give up at the first sign of trouble and assume they’re failures. Professionals see failure as part of the path to growth and mastery.
- An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise.
- An artist must have his measuring tools, not in the hand, but in the eye.
- An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject, and how to avoid them.Werner HeisenbergSourced
- Anyone can do it once. The best do it consistently.
- Apply yourself everyday to just becoming a little bit better.
- Are you going to make mistakes? Of course. But it is not failure if you make the full effort.
- Art and science have their meeting point in method.
- Art is the beautiful way of doing things.
- As a coach, your high standards of performance, attention to detail and – above all – how hard you work set the stage for how your players perform.
- As the Zen Buddhist saying goes, how you do anything is how you do everything.
- Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.
- Be average at the things you do once and exceptional at the things you do often.
- Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let everyone know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it.