68 Quotes On Achieving Excellence

Striving for excellence is a journey that resonates with many, pushing us to transcend our limitations and achieve our highest potential. Whether it’s in our personal lives, professional endeavors, or creative pursuits, the pursuit of excellence requires dedication, inspiration, and a mindset that embraces continuous improvement. To fuel your journey towards achieving greatness, we have meticulously gathered a selection of 68 insightful quotes that encapsulate the essence of striving for excellence. These quotes are crafted to inspire, motivate, and challenge you to harness your inner drive and turn aspirations into realities. Join us as we delve into these words of wisdom, igniting the passion within to aim higher and achieve more in every endeavor.

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. “These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions ... The good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life.” - Aristotle

8. “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

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

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. “To hate excellence is to hate the gods.” - Mary Renault

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

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

15. “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

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

17. “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

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

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

20. “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

21. “[All the ancient wisdom] tells us that work is necessary to us, as much a part of our condition as mortality; that good work is our salvation and our joy; that shoddy or dishonest or self-serving work is our curse and our doom. We have tried to escape the sweat and sorrow promised in Genesis - only to find that, in order to do so, we must forswear love and excellence, health and joy.(pg. 44, "The Unsettling of America")” - Wendell Berry

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

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

24. “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

25. “People simply feel better about themselves when they’re good at something.” - Stephen R. Covey

26. “But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.” - Thornton Wilder

27. “To have a man whose name is on the label showing such interest, commitment, and determination for the best is a wonderful thing. This is someone who will throw money at quality, who believes in being the best. Never knock it. Would you prefer to have a bean counter in corporate headquarters, someone who never comes near the brewery, making decisions solely on the basis of the bottom line and profit margins?” - Charles Bamforth

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

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

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

31. “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life.” - Steve Jobs

32. “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

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

34. “There were far worse strategies in life than to try to make each aspect of one's existence a minor work of art.” - Pat Conroy

35. “To stay vigorous, a company needs to provide a stimulating and challenging environment for all these types: the dreamer, the entrepreneur, the professional manager, and the leader. If it doesn't, it risks becoming yet another mediocre corporation.” - Howard Schultz

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

37. “In the land where excellence is commended, not envied, where weakness is aided, not mocked, there is no question as to how its inhabitants are all superhuman.” - Criss Jami

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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

42. “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

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

44. “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

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

46. “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

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

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

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

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

51. “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

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

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

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

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

56. “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.

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

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

59. “Leaders are readers, disciples want to be taught and everyone has gifts within that need to be coached to excellence.” - Wayde Goodall

60. “Be driven with purpose. Be relentless in your alignment with excellence. Pay no mind to the disimpassioned impotent haters.” - Steve Maraboli

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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “0 true and heavenly grace, without which our own merits are nothing, and our natural gifts of no account! Neither arts nor riches, beauty nor strength, genius nor eloquence have any value in Your eyes, Lord, unless allied to grace. For the gifts of nature are common to good men and bad alike, but grace or love are Your especial gift to those whom You choose, and those who are sealed with this are counted worthy of life everlasting.” - Thomas A. Kempis

65. “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

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

67. “When I think of excellence in motion, I think of the big picture. Because of the magnitude of this concept, I look at it from an aerial perspective. It is a mindset that challenges the boundaries of self-induced limits—that point where you aspire to exceed your expectations, where the mind-body-achievement connection resides and wins time and time again.” - Lorii Myers

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