Excellence

(439 votes)   It is the mark of an instructed mind to rest satisfied with the degree of precision which the nature of the subject admits and not to seek exactness when only an approximation of the truth is possible.

Aristotle
BC 384-322, Greek Philosopher

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(211 votes)   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 Jr.
1929-1968, American Black Leader, Nobel Prize Winner, 1964

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(156 votes)   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
1754-1824, French Moralist

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(127 votes)   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
1913-1970, American Football Coach

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(123 votes)   Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

W. Somerset Maugham
1874-1965, British Novelist, Playwright

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(117 votes)   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
18?-1956, American Businessman, Founder of IBM

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(115 votes)   Great men are but common men more fully developed and ripened.

Orison Swett Marden
1850-1924, American Author, Founder of Success Magazine

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

Thomas J. Watson
18?-1956, American Businessman, Founder of IBM

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(110 votes)   Superiority -- doing things a little better than anybody else can do them.

Orison Swett Marden
1850-1924, American Author, Founder of Success Magazine

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(106 votes)   Excellence is to do a common thing in an uncommon way.

Booker T. Washington
1856-1915, American Black Leader and Educator

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(106 votes)   From time to time there appear on the face of the earth men of rare and consummate excellence, who dazzle us by their virtue, and whose outstanding qualities shed a stupendous light. Like those extraordinary stars of whose origins we are ignorant, and of whose fate, once they have vanished, we know even less, such men have neither forebears nor descendants: they are the whole of their race.

Jean De La BruyFre
1645-1696, French Classical Writer

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(106 votes)   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
1811-1896, American Novelist, Antislavery Campaigner

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(104 votes)   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
1850-1924, American Author, Founder of Success Magazine

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(101 votes)   Put the uncommon effort into the common task... make it large by doing it in a great way.

Orison Swett Marden
1850-1924, American Author, Founder of Success Magazine

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(100 votes)   Doing common things uncommonly well.

Orison Swett Marden
1850-1924, American Author, Founder of Success Magazine

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