This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts." - Aristotle NULL
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit." - Aristotle NULL
"Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence." - Author Unknown NULL
"A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence." - Baltasar Gracián
"Excellence resides in quality, not in quantity." - Baltasar Gracián
"Nothing is more common than good things; the only question is how to discern them; it is certain that all of them are natural and within our reach and even known by every one. But we do not know how to distinguish them. This is universal. It is not in things extraordinary and strange that excellence of any kind is found. We reach up for it, and we are further away; more often than not we must stoop. The best books are those whose readers think they; could have written them. Nature, which alone is good, is familiar and common throughout." - Blaise Pascal
"The greatest baseness of man is the pursuit of glory. But it is also the great mark of his excellence; for whatever possessions he may have on earth, whatever health and essential comfort, he is not satisfied if he has not the esteem of men." - Blaise Pascal
"In season of tumult and discord bad men have most power; mental and moral excellence require peace and quietness." - Tacitus, fully Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus NULL
"It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"I was greatly influenced by one of my teachers. She had a zeal not so much for perfection as for steady betterment - she demanded not excellence so much as integrity." - Edward R. Murrow, born Egbert Roscoe Murrow
"What then makes a man beautiful? Is it not the possession of the excellence of a man?" - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL
"No invention could ever take the hard work out of creating - out of good writing, painting, composing, inventing, etc. The economy of the spirit is incurably an economy of scarcity. An affluent society might be able to dispense with the ethic of work in its everyday life, but to attain any sort of excellence it will have to implant implacable taskmasters in the breasts of its people. Indeed, without the disciple of the creative effort the affluent society will be without stability. It might have to become a creative society in order to survive." - Eric Hoffer
"Strive for excellence, not perfection." - H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
"In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Art has no excellence higher than true simplicity. Art has no abomination baser than artificial simplicity." - Jacob Klatzkin
"Remember always, in painting as in eloquence, the greater your strength, the quieter will be your manner, and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim." - John Ruskin
"Good maxims are the germs of all excellence." - Joseph Joubert
"Excellence seekers are not 20% better in any one area. They are 1% better in 20 different areas." - Lou Holtz, fully Louis Leo "Lou" Holtz
"Excellence costs a great deal." - May Sarton, pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton
"Sharpen your thinking about goal setting. Be realistic about the amount of time and effort that might be necessary. Make a commitment to excellence. Learn to distinguish between a goal and a wish. Prepare for ultimate goals by achieving your interim goals. Choose goals that will benefit others as well as yourself." - Norman Vincent Peale
"There are some faults so nearly allied to excellence that we can scarce weed out the vice without eradicating the virtue." - Oliver Goldsmith
"The soul of the child in his play should be guided to the love of that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he will have to be perfected." - Plato NULL
"The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected." - Plato NULL
"God did not make the soul after the body… He made the soul in origin and excellence prior to and older than the body, to be the ruler and mistress, of whom the body was to be the subject." - Plato NULL
"Excellence is the perfect excuse. Do it well, and it matters little what." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Excellence is lost sight of in the hunger for sudden performance and praise." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free! We can learn to fly!" - Richard Bach, fully Richard David Bach
"The Divine beauty is not adoredned with any shape or endowment of form, or with any beauty of color, but is contemplated as excellence in unspeakable bliss." - Saint Gregory, aka Pope Gregory I, St. Gregory the Dialogist, "Gregory the Great" NULL
"The supreme excellence is not to win a hundred victories in a hundred battles. The supreme excellence is to subdue the armies of your enemies without even having to fight them." - Sun Tzu or Sunzi
"By appreciation we make excellence in others our own property." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"When we ask poets and artists to tell us what they have found in God, they answer with one voice, “We have found him in beauty. Only it is a beauty that never was on land or sea, a beauty that in its transcendent excellence makes our best handiwork seem tawdry.”" - William Adams Brown
"We often choose a friend as we do a mistress - for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love." - William Hazlitt
"Education is, as a rule, the strongest force on the side of what exists and against fundamental change: threatened institutions, while they are still powerful, possess themselves of the educational machine, and instill a respect for their own excellence into the malleable minds of the young." - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters. Excellence is not an exception, it is a prevailing attitude. " - Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell
"The pursuit of excellence is less profitable than the pursuit of bigness, but it can be more satisfying. " - David Ogilvy
" The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Hence the ardour of the selfish to better their fortunes, and to add to their personal accomplishments; and hence the zeal of the patriot and philosopher to advance the virtue and the happiness of the human race. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes." - Dugald Stewart
"In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace. When man will be fully adapted to this technological society, when he will end by obeying with enthusiasm, convinced of the excellence of what he is forced to do, the constraint of the organization will no longer be felt by him; the truth is, it will no longer be a constraint, and the police will have nothing to do. The civic and technological good will and the enthusiasm for the right social myths — both created by propaganda — will finally have solved the problem of man." - Jacques Ellul
"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, fully James Albert Michener
"Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. " - James Bryant Conant
"Nothing is such an obstacle to the production of excellence as the power of producing what is good with ease and rapidity." - John Aiken or Aikin
"Maxwell identifies the following trade-offs that serve as landmarks: 1) achievement over affirmation, 2) excellence over acceptability, 3) personal growth over immediate pleasure, 4) future potential over financial gain, 5) a narrow focus over scattered interests, and significant over security." - John C. Maxwell
"Some people have greatness thrust upon them. Few have excellence thrust upon them... achieve it. They do not achieve it unwittingly by doing what comes naturally and they don't stumble into it in the course of amusing themselves. All excellence involves discipline and tenacity of purpose." - John W. Gardner, fully John William 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, fully John William Gardner
"Whoever I am, or whatever I am doing, some kind of excellence is within my reach." - John W. Gardner, fully John William Gardner
"Sometimes in the pursuit of fame and the search for significance and the desire for that elusive excellence we all remember the slaps and forget the kisses." - Krish Khanam
"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play, his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself he always seems to be doing both. Enough for him that he does it well." - L. P. Jacks, fully Lawrence Pearsall Jacks
"Real excellence and humility are not incompatible one with the other, on the contrary they are twin sisters." - Lacordaire, fully Jean Baptiste Henri Lacordaire NULL