Inspirations

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.

- Aristotle

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

- Aristotle

Whatever you do, don't do it halfway.

- Bob Beamon

People who produce good results feel good about themselves.

- Ken Blanchard

A racehorse that consistently runs just a second faster than another horse is worth millions of dollars more. Be willing to give that extra effort that separates the winner from the one in second place.

- H Jackson Brown Junior

One of the most essential things you need to do for yourself is to choose a goal that is important to you. Perfection does not exist, you can always do better and you can always grow.

- Les Brown

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.

- Les Brown

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

- Thomas Carlyle

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

- Andrew Carnegie

I can do small things in a great way.

- James Freeman Clarke

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

- Leonardo Da Vinci

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

- Isaac Disraeli

There's a way to do better, find it.

- Thomas A Edison

Excellence encourages one about life generally, it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

- George Eliot

There is always a best way of doing everything.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

I use nothing but the best ingredients. My cookies are always baked fresh. I price cookies so that you cannot make them at home for any less. And I still give cookies away.

- Debbie Fields

You get the best out of others when you get the best out of yourself.

- Harvey S Firestone

If something is exceptionally well done it has embedded in it's very existence the aim of lifting the common denominator rather than catering to it.

- Edward Fischer

If I play my best, I can win anywhere in the world against anybody.

- Ray Floyd

The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with confidence.

- Henry Ford

The real contest is always between what you've done and what you're capable of doing. You measure yourself against yourself and nobody else.

- Geoffrey Gaberino

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

- John W Gardner

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

- John W Gardner

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

- John W Gardner

The fact is, the difference between peak performers and everybody else are much smaller than everybody else thinks.

- Charles A Garfield

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

- Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.

- J Paul Getty

Excellence is rarely found, more rarely valued.

- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured, to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.

- Oliver Goldsmith

There is no top. There are always further heights to reach.

- Jascha Heifetz

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

- Napoleon Hill

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

- Napoleon Hill

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

- Napoleon Hill

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do, they always reach.

- Lee Iacocca

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

- Lyndon B Johnson

We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

- Joseph Joubert

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

- John Keats

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, 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 streetsweeper who did his job well.

- Martin Luther King Junior

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

- Charles Kingsley

I never had a policy, I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

- Abraham Lincoln

If you'll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.

- Vince Lombardi

When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.

- Sir John Lubbock

There is a canyon of difference between doing your best to glorify God and doing whatever it takes to glorify yourself. The quest for excellence is a mark of maturity. The quest for power is childish.

- Max L Lucado

You always have to give 100 percent, because if you don't, someone, someplace, will give 100 percent and will beat you when you meet.

- Ed Macauley

It isn't by size that you win or fail, be the best of whatever you are.

- Douglas Malloch

Today, and every day, deliver more than you are getting paid to do. The victory of success will be half won when you learn the secret of putting out more than is expected in all that you do. Make yourself so valuable in your work that eventually you will become indispensable. Exercise your privilege to go the extra mile, and enjoy all the rewards you receive. You deserve them!

- Og Mandino

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

- Og Mandino

One of the great undiscovered joys of life comes from doing everything one attempts to the best of one's ability. There is a special sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in its parts, which the superficial person who leaves his or her work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition, can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns any work into art. The smallest task, well done, becomes a miracle of achievement.

- Og Mandino

The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.

- Og Mandino

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

- Katherine Mansfield

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.

- Orison Swett Marden

The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.

- Orison Swett Marden

Put the uncommon effort into the common task, make it large by doing it in a great way.

- Orison Swett Marden

Make it a life-rule to give your best to whatever passes through your hands. Stamp it with your manhood. Let superiority be your trademark.

- Orison Swett Marden

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 hall-mark of excellence.

- Orison Swett Marden

It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.

- Orison Swett Marden

It is just the little difference between the good and the best that makes the difference between the artist and the artisan. It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that makes the master's fame.

- Orison Swett Marden

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

- Orison Swett Marden

Doing common things uncommonly well.

- Orison Swett Marden

Superiority, doing things a little better than anybody else can do them.

- Orison Swett Marden

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

- W Somerset Maugham

To enjoy enduring success we should travel a little in advance of the world.

- John Mcdonald

Become all that you are capable of becoming!

- Robert J Mckain

If we want to make something really superb on this planet, there is nothing whatever that can stop us.

- Shepherd Mead

Do a little bit more than average and from that point on our progress multiplies itself out of all proportion to the effort put in.

- Paul J Meyer

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

- James A Michener

People forget how fast you did a job, but they remember how well you did it.

- Howard W Newton

There is no finish line.

- Nike Corporation

Don't waste your time striving for perfection, instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.

- Sir Lawrence Olivier

Great men are little men expanded, great lives are ordinary lives intensified.

- Wilferd A Peterson

No matter how small and unimportant what we are doing may seem, if we do it well, it may soon become the step that will lead us to better things.

- Channing Pollock

You must be resolutely determined that whatever you do shall always be the best of which you are capable.

- Charles E Popplestone

The uncommon man is merely the common man thinking and dreaming of success in larger terms and in more fruitful areas.

- Melvin Powers

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

- Pat Riley

Our goal, simply stated, is to be the best.

- James H Robinson

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

- Anita Roddick

Do more than you're supposed to do and you can have or be or do anything you want.

- Bill Sands

The success combination in business is, Do what you do better, and, Do more of what you do.

- David J Schwartz

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

- Seneca

We must do the best we can with what we have.

- Edward Rowland Sill

True greatness consists in being great in little things.

- Charles Simmons

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.

- Harriet Beecher Stowe

Do a little more each day than you think you possibly can.

- Lowell Thomas

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

- Brian Tracy

There is no such thing as natural touch. Touch is something you create by hitting millions of golf balls.

- Lee Trevino

The road to excellence is always under construction

- Source Unknown

Let each day be your masterpiece.

- Source Unknown

Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can reach. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries and predecessors, try to be better than yourself.

- Source Unknown

Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.''

- Source Unknown

Excellence is best described as doing the right things right -- selecting the most important things to be done and then accomplishing them 100% correctly.

- Source Unknown

Four short words sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd: a little bit more. They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more.

- A Lou Vickery

The most splendid achievement of all is the constant striving to surpass yourself and to be worthy of your own approval.

- Denis Waitley

Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art, an individual masterpiece.

- Denis Waitley

Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

- Booker T Washington

If you aren't playing well, the game isn't as much fun. When that happens I tell myself just to go out and play as I did when I was a kid.

- Thomas J Watson

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work.

- Thomas J Watson

Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for.

- Woodrow T Wilson

My philosophy is that not only are you responsible for your life, but doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

- Oprah Winfrey

It isn't what you do, but how you do it.

- John Wooden

The principle is competing against yourself. It's about self improvement, about being better than you were the day before.

- Steve Young

Inspire-U-2-B-Excellent

Get Inspired for Happiness Strategy 8: Doing More Activities that Truly Engage You

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.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.

Whatever you do, don't do it halfway.

People who produce good results feel good about themselves.

A racehorse that consistently runs just a second faster than another horse is worth millions of dollars more. Be willing to give that extra effort that separates the winner from the one in second place.

One of the most essential things you need to do for yourself is to choose a goal that is important to you. Perfection does not exist, you can always do better and you can always grow.

Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.

Let each become all that he was created capable of being.

Do not look for approval except for the consciousness of doing your best.

I can do small things in a great way.

I have offended God and mankind because my work didn't reach the quality it should have.

It is a wretched taste to be gratified with mediocrity when the excellent lies before us.

There's a way to do better, find it.

Excellence encourages one about life generally, it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

There is always a best way of doing everything.

I use nothing but the best ingredients. My cookies are always baked fresh. I price cookies so that you cannot make them at home for any less. And I still give cookies away.

You get the best out of others when you get the best out of yourself.

If something is exceptionally well done it has embedded in it's very existence the aim of lifting the common denominator rather than catering to it.

If I play my best, I can win anywhere in the world against anybody.

The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them, and then make our plans with confidence.

The real contest is always between what you've done and what you're capable of doing. You measure yourself against yourself and nobody else.

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well.

Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach.

The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.

The fact is, the difference between peak performers and everybody else are much smaller than everybody else thinks.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

The man who comes up with a means for doing or producing almost anything better, faster or more economically has his future and his fortune at his fingertips.

Excellence is rarely found, more rarely valued.

To aim at excellence, our reputation, and friends, and all must be ventured, to aim at the average we run no risk and provide little service.

There is no top. There are always further heights to reach.

It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.

You can start right where you stand and apply the habit of going the extra mile by rendering more service and better service than you are now being paid for.

If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.

The kind of people I look for to fill top management spots are the eager beavers, the mavericks. These are the guys who try to do more than they're expected to do, they always reach.

The noblest search is the search for excellence.

We do not do well except when we know where the best is and when we are assured that we have touched it and hold its power within us.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, 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 streetsweeper who did his job well.

Being forced to work, and forced to do your best, will breed in you temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will, cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle will never know.

I never had a policy, I have just tried to do my very best each and every day.

If you'll not settle for anything less than your best, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish in your lives.

When we have done our best, we should wait the result in peace.

There is a canyon of difference between doing your best to glorify God and doing whatever it takes to glorify yourself. The quest for excellence is a mark of maturity. The quest for power is childish.

You always have to give 100 percent, because if you don't, someone, someplace, will give 100 percent and will beat you when you meet.

It isn't by size that you win or fail, be the best of whatever you are.

Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.

The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

There is an infinite difference between a little wrong and just right, between fairly good and the best, between mediocrity and superiority.

The greatest thing a man can do in this world is to make the most possible out of the stuff that has been given him. This is success, and there is no other.

Put the uncommon effort into the common task, make it large by doing it in a great way.

Make it a life-rule to give your best to whatever passes through your hands. Stamp it with your manhood. Let superiority be your trademark.

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 hall-mark of excellence.

It is those who have this imperative demand for the best in their natures, and who will accept nothing short of it, that holds the banners of progress, that set the standards, the ideals, for others.

It is just the little difference between the good and the best that makes the difference between the artist and the artisan. It is just the little touches after the average man would quit that makes the master's fame.

Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

Doing common things uncommonly well.

Superiority, doing things a little better than anybody else can do them.

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

To enjoy enduring success we should travel a little in advance of the world.

Become all that you are capable of becoming!

If we want to make something really superb on this planet, there is nothing whatever that can stop us.

Do a little bit more than average and from that point on our progress multiplies itself out of all proportion to the effort put in.

People forget how fast you did a job, but they remember how well you did it.

There is no finish line.

Don't waste your time striving for perfection, instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.

Great men are little men expanded, great lives are ordinary lives intensified.

No matter how small and unimportant what we are doing may seem, if we do it well, it may soon become the step that will lead us to better things.

You must be resolutely determined that whatever you do shall always be the best of which you are capable.

The uncommon man is merely the common man thinking and dreaming of success in larger terms and in more fruitful areas.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

Our goal, simply stated, is to be the best.

If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.

Do more than you're supposed to do and you can have or be or do anything you want.

The success combination in business is, Do what you do better, and, Do more of what you do.

It is quality rather than quantity that matters.

We must do the best we can with what we have.

True greatness consists in being great in little things.