#excellence

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves. ↗

— Aristotle

#each #excellence #friendship #good #men

Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success. ↗

— Walter Bagehot

#bad one #dullness #excellence #good #good sign

No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction. ↗

— Charles Kendall Adams

#amount #attains #determines #distinction #doing

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces. ↗

— Thomas Aquinas

#does #excellence #goes #lie #produces

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music. ↗

— Denis Diderot

#allowed #dulling #excellence #goodbye #human

Mediocre men work at their best; men seeking excellence strive to do better. ↗

— Edwin Louis Cole

#better #excellence #mediocre #mediocre men #men

You've just got to focus on excellence and try not to be distracted by the news and the rumors and the absurdities of the stories that were coming out. ↗

— James Daly

#distracted #excellence #focus #got #just

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

#creation #excellence #god #nature #respect

I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence. ↗

— John Metcalf

#approach #become #committed #excellence #gathering

We need to internalize this idea of excellence. Not many folks spend a lot of time trying to be excellent. ↗

— Barack Obama

#excellent #folks #idea #internalize #lot