56 Inspiring Quotes On Excellence

In a world constantly striving for improvement and growth, the pursuit of excellence remains a timeless endeavor that inspires individuals across all walks of life. Whether it's in personal development, professional achievements, or creative pursuits, the journey towards excellence fuels our aspirations and motivates us to reach beyond our limits. Quotes on excellence serve as powerful reminders of the potential that lies within each of us. They encapsulate the wisdom and experiences of those who have walked the path before us, offering insights and encouragement to keep us focused on our goals. In this collection of 56 inspiring quotes, you'll find words of wisdom that ignite the spirit, challenge complacency, and inspire the relentless pursuit of greatness.

1. “My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest.” - Charles Dickens

2. “If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as a Michaelangelo 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.

3. “Mediocrity will never do. You are capable of something better.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

4. “Its hard to be a diamond in a rhinestone world.” - Dolly Parton

5. “Do your best, and be a little better than you are.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

6. “I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.” - Abraham Lincoln

7. “To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don't isolate.” - Michael Jordan

8. “I have been to lots of partiesand acted perfectly disgracefulbut I never actually collapsedoh Lana Turner we love you get up” - Frank O'Hara

9. “Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.” - Booker T. Washington

10. “Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.” - Hunter S. Thompson

11. “We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.” - Henry Ward Beecher

12. “If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have the time to do it over?” - John Wooden

13. “Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. (The perfect is the enemy of the good.)” - Voltaire

14. “Some people insist that 'mediocre' is better than 'best.' They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can't fly. They despise brains because they have none.” - Robert A. Heinlein

15. “If I cannot do great things, I can do small things in a great way” - Martin Luther King Jr.

16. “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.” - Ronnie Oldham

17. “People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.” - Joel Osteen

18. “Human tragedies:We all want to be extraordinaryand we all just want to fit in.Unfortunately, extraordinary people rarely fit in.” - Sebastyne Young

19. “Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. (pg. 312, Christianity and the Survival of Creation)” - Wendell Berry

20. “Do ordinary things extraordinarily well.” - Gregg Harris

21. “I am a man of simple tastes easily satisfied with the best” - Winston S. Churchill

22. “I hope you will simply do what you can do in the best way you know. If you do so, you will witness miracles come to pass.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

23. “Learn the rules before you break them.” - Steven Taylor Goldsberry

24. “There has always been an elegance to the application of excellence.” - Richard Diaz

25. “Focus on making yourself better, not on thinking that you are better.” - Bohdi Sanders

26. “I don't settle in any other area of my life when it comes to excellence, so why should I lower my standards when it comes to boys?” - Adriana Trigiani

27. “You've baked a really lovely cake, but then you've used dog shit for frosting.” - Steve Jobs

28. “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence” - Vince Lombardi

29. “Coach said. "the quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor".” - Sherman Alexie

30. “To be acceptable is for one to ignore his weakness while knowing his strength, to cover the scar even though it's always there, however, to be impossible is for one to see his weakness as, not an adversary, but the cherry on top of his strength, to rearrange the scar so that it compliments his features.” - Criss Jami

31. “The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it's a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that's too hard for me. I'm telling a story I'm not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I'm forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I'll have written something that is better than I am.” - Shannon Hale

32. “There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous; because of a forbidden longing deep within him that ran quite contrary to his life's task and was for that very reason seductive, a longing for the unarticulated and immeasurable, for eternity, for nothingness. To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence; and is not nothingness a form of perfection?” - Thomas Mann

33. “To seek greatness is the only righteous vengeance.” - Criss Jami

34. “Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” - Will Durant

35. “If you’re any good at all, you know you can be better.” - Lindsay Buckingham

36. “As Aristotle said, 'Excellence is a habit.' I would say furthermore that excellence is made constant through the feeling that comes right after one has completed a work which he himself finds undeniably awe-inspiring. He only wants to relax until he's ready to renew such a feeling all over again because to him, all else has become absolutely trivial.” - Criss Jami

37. “Excellence must be achieved through the eyes of those who judge us; once achieved it can only be maintained with constant innovation.” - Tom Collins

38. “Just make up your mind at the very outset that your work is going to stand for quality... that you are going to stamp a superior quality upon everything that goes out of your hands, that whatever you do shall bear the hallmark of excellence.” - Orison Swett Marden

39. “What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare.” - Robert Farrar Capon

40. “We must cooperate to turn this country around; otherwise there will be no more future to speak of for our children.” - Rex Resurreccion

41. “The excellent person manages himself. He will not allow the environment to manage him.” - Rex Resurreccion

42. “The present and the future belong to believers and practitioners of excellence; not the "dinosaurs.” - Rex Resurreccion

43. “As sure as shadow follows substance and the sun rises on the east and sets on the west, a person who exercises professional excellence will be followed by success.” - Rex Resurreccion

44. “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected.” - Steve Jobs

45. “Only the mediocre artist is always at his best.” - Victor J. Banis

46. “when i run i run fastwhen i read time whirls pastwhatever you do todaydo it in the best possible way” - Cassondra

47. “Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time.” - Habeeb Akande

48. “Never allow your desires to lead you away from God; allow nothing else to control you other than God and His Word. No matter what you see or pass through, don’t allow them to define you.” - Agu, Jaachynma N.E.

49. “Wealth does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.” - Socrates

50. “In other words, we are never freer than when we become most ourselves, most human, most just, most excellent, and the like.” - Os Guinness

51. “Happiness, Success, Excellence: They are not something you get for knowing the path; they are something you experience by walking it.” - Steve Maraboli

52. “After the woman left, Gran, staring out back at the Zebra Forest, said to me, 'I'm a liar, I'll admit. But I pride myself on being a really good liar. That's part of my educational philosophy, too, Annie B. Mark that down. Lesson one: If you're going to do something, make sure to do it with excellence.” - Adina Rishe Gewirtz

53. “You unlock the door to greater levels of excellence and success when you accept who you are. It is from the point of acceptance that we can create a masterful life.” - Steve Maraboli

54. “Most of us are continually engaged in some form of pursuit. We are seeking excellence within one or more areas in our lives, and that is the basis of our motivation. It is human nature to have a need to get ahead, need a little something more—it’s in our DNA. Although we may not be certain of what we need at any given moment, we know there’s something. It’s a competitive itch and desire to improve that never goes away.” - Lorii Myers

55. “True sportsmanship is excellence in motion!” - Lorii Myers

56. “Excellence prospers in the absence of excuses.” - Lorii Myers