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Quotations about excellence
Note that not all quotations have been tagged, so the Search function may find additional quotations on this topic.
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
Vince Lombardi (1913-1970) American football coach
(Attributed)
Life is too short to do mediocre work and it is definitely too short to build shitty things.
Stewart Butterfield (b. 1973) Canadian tech entrepreneur and businessman
(Attributed)
It’s a sad fact of modern life that sooner or later you will end up on YouTube doing something stupid. The trick, according to my dad, is to make a fool of yourself to the best of your ability.
Ben Aaronovitch (b. 1964) British author
Broken Homes (2013)
You don’t become great by trying to be great. You become great by wanting to do something, then doing it so hard that you become great in the process.
Randall Munroe (b. 1984) American webcomic writer, roboticist, programmer
XKCD, # 896 “Marie Curie” (9 May 2011)
(Source)
We are very near to greatness: one step and we are safe: can we not take the leap?
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American essayist, lecturer, poet
Journal (28 Oct 1841)
Why worry? If you’ve done the very best you can, worrying won’t make it any better.
Walt Disney (1901-1966) American entrepreneur, animator, film producer, showman
In “The Amazing Secret of Walt Disney,” Interview by Don Eddy, The American Magazine (Aug 1955)
(Source)
It’s a funny thing about life; if you refuse to accept anything but the best, you very often get it.
W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) English novelist and playwright [William Somerset Maugham]
“The Treasure,” The Mixture as Before (1940)
We are challenged on every hand to work untiringly to achieve excellence in our lifework. Not all men are called to specialized or professional jobs; even fewer rise to the heights of genius in the arts and sciences; many are called to be laborers in factories, fields and streets. But no work is insignificant. All labor that uplifts should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. If a man is called to be a street sweeper he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say “Here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) American clergyman, civil rights leader, orator
Sermon, New Covenant Baptist Church, Chicago (9 Apr 1967)
Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.
Lord Chesterfield (1694-1773) English statesman, wit [Philip Dormer Stanhope]
Letter to his son (10 Mar 1746)
You’re the top!
You’re the Colosseum.
You’re the top!
You’re the Louvre Museum.
You’re a melody from a symphony by Strauss,
You’re a Bendel bonnet, a Shakespeare sonnet,
You’re Mickey Mouse.You’re the Nile,
You’re the Tow’r of Pisa,
You’re the smile
On the Mona Lisa.
I’m a worthless check, a total wreck, a flop,
But if, baby, I’m the bottom
You’re the top!Cole Porter (1891-1964) American composer and songwriter
“You’re the Top” (1934)
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle (384-322 BC) Greek philosopher
Nicomachean Ethics (c. 350 BC) (paraphrase)
Variants: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." "We are what we repeatedly do, therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit."
Not actually Aristotle, but a summary by Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers (1926), ch. II "Aristotle and Greek Science," Part VII "Ethics and the Nature of Happiness" (1926):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'; 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.'"The quoted phrases are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, ch. 4; Book 1, ch. 7.
