Quotes about Excellence

Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be.  Become one yourself!

Excellence of mind itself, rightly conceived, is expertise in beauty; creativity is wise love.

Without doubt I praise the wild excellence...

The key to all aristeia and wisdom and gnosis is a seed that conformist and mediocritist and democratist Americans haven't got even a scintilla of a prospect of nourishing, and that is sapere aude:  DARE TO BE WISE.  

"Integrity first, service before self, excellence in all we do."
(USAF Core Values)

In this world, not to be concerned with the pursuit of arete means to be doomed not just in the struggle with life but also in the struggle with other peoples: a people so facile, slack and fatuous as not to prepare to defend itself has already naively resolved to live out its existence as the enslaved subjects of others. War is omnipresent, to some a demoralizing eventual fate of all cities, and to others "the [Heraclitean] father of all things," i.e. the spur to all forms of virtue and excellence. We should be as energized and passionate about our commitment to our utmost values and self-culture as the warrior must be in learning the arts upon which his very life will depend.

Learning to free up or liberate one's mind to capture precisely the most essential points in anything is an athletic exercise in which, for the first time, we discover just what the actual cash-value of our "culture" truly is: has our culture contributed to making our minds more acute, clearer, more nimble and elastic? Has it given us a richer vocabulary of essences or concepts to facilitate our rational and moral digestion of issues? Or is our "culture" really no enzymatic culture at all, but merely a scheme of encumbrances, of intellectual and rational impediments that have been compounded out of endless Pavlovian conditionings, by which we came to accept fallacies and equivocations and deceptive connotations and lying rhetoric etc. as if they were the gospel truth? The premier value of reading the ancient thinkers lies in their aristocratic culture's determination to put an absolute premium on the development of acuity, directness, economy or essentiality of characterizations, etc. To be competent as an "aristos" (one committed absolutely to the cultivation of excellence or "arete" in its superlative degree), an individual was expected to keen his insights and judgment as much in the domain of intuition (being sensitive to the subtleties of the evidence, the realities) as in the domain of intellection (mustering the most apt tools of expression to characterize, conceptualize and evaluate these realities). Moderns have only the feeblest grasp of both of these processes.

Men who have made "life" easier and more bountiful for moderns have done nothing to make life more eminently VALUABLE, fit to be valued. We appreciate our inventors and benefactors but in truth they have done nothing whatsoever to teach us how to make ourselves more excellent, more WORTHY of freedom and life and culture. It is all very well to feed multitudes with self-replicating fishes and loaves; but the question that goes unperceived is, AS WHAT are we helping man to survive? What are we encouraging this consumer to BECOME, to AIM AT, to HUNGER AFTER as the fulfillment of the whole purpose of his living?

Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.

Greek culture understands the key to understanding nature, instinct and organism as consisting in the endowment of each creature with some distinctive "excellence" or talent (arete).  Among humans there is great controversy whether (because of the diversity among different character-types and the clash of different political and philosophical perspectives) there is at all such a unitary, universal or congruent thing as "excellence" for man per se.  There are many aspectival or specialized excellences; but does man in general have a defining purpose or a metaphysically obligatory excellence that everyone, just insofar as he is human, is obligated to cultivate and pursue?  --Or do we have a problem here in trying to extend the term "human" to creatures who really have little substantial in common with one another?

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.       

Appreciation is a wonderful thing; It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.

Every genius thinks INWARDLY toward his Mind instead of outwardly toward his senses. The genius can hear sounds coming out of the silence with his inner ears. He can vision non-existent forms with his inner eyes and he can feel the rhythms of God's thinking and His knowing -- which are a blank slate to the man who believes that HE is his body. When a human rises to the exalted state of genius, he becomes a co-Creator with God. The beginning of creative expression in man is the first evidence of the unfolding Light of his genius, for no man who is purely sense-controlled can create. He can remember and repeat the records which he has imprinted upon his physical brain, but his brain has no knowledge. Therefore, he cannot create. Man can create only with his Mind -- and the brain is not the Mind. The brain is merely the seat of sensation and the electric recorder of sensation.

"We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, therefore is not an act, but a habit"

We got it right when we said that we were in search of excellence. Not competitive advantage. Not economic growth. Not market dominance or strategic differentiation. Not maximized shareholder value. Excellence. It's just as true today. Business isn't some disembodied bloodless enterprise. Profit is fine -- a sign that the customer honors the value of what we do. But "enterprise" (a lovely word) is about heart. About beauty. It's about art. About people throwing themselves on the line. It's about passion and the selfless pursuit of an ideal. It's about John Young sitting in his little cubicle working in his shirtsleeves. It's cool. In Search of Excellence -- even the title -- is a reminder that business isn't dry, dreary, boring, or by the numbers. Life at work can be cool -- and work that's cool isn't confined to Tiger Woods, Yo-Yo Ma, or Tom Hanks. It's available to all of us and any of us.

He should sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will pause to say, 'Here lives a great street-sweeper who did his job well'.

The more that you allow yourself thatfreedom to be uniquely you and to express yourself in your creativity, in your passion of it, the more you express your own unique excellence. Elias

I wanted to change the rules of engagement, asking for more— from fewer. I was insisting that we had to have only the best people...If you wanted excellence, at a minimum, the ambience had to reflect excellence.

....Commit to excellence. Become massively innovative and wear your passion on your sleave. They might call you different or wierd or even crazy. But please remember, every great leader (or visionary or brave thinkier) was initially laughed at. Now they are revered.

The function of high school, then, is not so much to communicate knowledge as to oblige children finally to accept the grading system as a measure of their inner excellence. And a function of the self-destructive process in American children is to make them willing to accept not their own, but a variety of other standards, like a grading system, for measuring themselves. It is thus apparent that they way American culture is now integrated it would fall apart if it did not engender feelings of inferiority and worthlessness.

In these accelerating times, the traditional concept of success fritters away altogether as greatness takes precedent.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play....  He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leavaing others to decide whether he is working or playing.  To him he's always doing both.

The best athlete
wants his opponent at his best.
The best general
enters the mind of his enemy.
The best businessman
serves the communal good.
The best leader
follows the will of the people.

All of the embody
the virtue of non-competition.
Not that they don't love to compete,
but they do it in the spirit of play.
In this they are like children
and in harmony with the Tao.

The gull sees farthest who flies highest.

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.

Risk more than others think is safe, care more than others think is wise, dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.

Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.

"My new favorite word is 'awkward.'...The reason we need to be in search of awkward is that awkward is the barrier between us and excellence, between where we are and the remarkable. If it were easy, everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't be worth the effort."

The purpose of competition is not to beat someone down, but to bring out the best in every player.