#excellence

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

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

Each honest calling, each walk of life, has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance. ↗

— James Bryant Conant

#based #calling #each #elite #excellence

The excellence of a gift lies in its appropriateness rather than in its value. ↗

— Charles Dudley Warner

#excellence #gift #lies #rather #than

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

Consider ye the seed from which ye sprang; Ye were not made to live like unto brutes But for pursuit of virtue and of knowledge. ↗

— Dante Alighieri

#excellence #humanity #knowledge #life #virtue

The tourist who moves about to see and hear and open himself to all the influences of the places which condense centuries of human greatness is only a man in search of excellence. ↗

— Max Lerner

#centuries #condense #excellence #greatness #hear

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have. ↗

— Walter Pater

#beauty #been #between #discriminate #discussions

If you want people to listen, you have to have a platform to speak from, and that is excellence in what you do. ↗

— William Pollard

#listen #people #platform #speak #want

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence. ↗

— Edmund Clarence Stedman

#chief #dabble #easiest #excellence #fine