Excellence Quotes

Here’s a few excellence quotes that you can post on your fridge, cubicle wall, chalk board, mirror, etc.

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude. -Ralph Marston

You always have to give 100%, because if you don’t, someone, someplace, will give 100% and will beat you when you meet. -Ed Macauley

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. -Aristotle

If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work. -Thomas J. Watson (1874-1956)

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. -Og Mandino

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)

A superior man is modest in his speech, but exceeds in his actions. -Confucious

Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer. -Rick Pitino

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 Bruyere (1645-1696)

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 (1819-1875)

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

Excellence is in the details. Give attention to the details and excellence will come. -Perry Paxton

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

People who have accomplished work worthwhile have had a very high sense of the way to do things. They have not been content with mediocrity. They have not confined themselves to the beaten tracks; they have never been satisfied to do things just as others so them, but always a little better. They always pushed things that came to their hands a little higher up, this little farther on, that counts in the quality of life’s work. It is constant effort to be first-class in everything one attempts that conquers the heights of excellence. -Orison Swett Marden (1850-1924)

Excellence is doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. -John W. Gardner

Excellence is not an act but a habit. The things you do the most are the things you will do best. -Marva Collins

The success combination in business is: Do what you do better… and: Do more of what you do… -David J. Schwartz

Do more than you’re supposed to do and you can have or be or do anything you want. -Bill Sands

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

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

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

When you say you’ll meet someone at 11:00 AM, be there at 10:45. When you promise a check on the 30th, send it on the 28th. Whatever you agree to do, do it a bit more. Start with your employees, then extend it to everyone you deal with. News will soon get around that you are a person of your word. -Charles Prestwich Scott (1846-1932)

Great men are little men expanded; great lives are ordinary lives intensified. -Wilfred A. Peterson

Determine to become one of the best. Sufficient money will almost automatically follow if you get to be one of the “best” in your chosen field, whatever it is. -Donald G. Mitchell

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 is rewarded as such. -Og Mandino (1923-1996)

There are no speed limits on the road to excellence. -Unknown

We distinguish the excellent man from the common man by saying that the former is the one who makes great demands on himself, and the latter who makes no demands on himself. -Jose Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955)

Persistence is the twin sister of excellence. One is a matter of quality; the other, a matter of time. -Uknown

Do a little more each day than you think you possibly can. -Lowell Thomas (1892-1981)

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

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)

Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. -Sun Tzu

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

To fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. -Sun Tzu

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do. -Jose Ortega y Gasset

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

There’s no traffic jam on the extra mile. -Unknown

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

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

Exceed expectations. We are not driven to do extraordinary things, but to do ordinary things extraordinarily well. -Bishop Gore

The only way to excellence is to consistently improve yourself every single day. -Thomas J. Vilord

Next to excellence is the appreciation of it. -William Makepeace Thackeray

Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy. -Jose Paterno

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 (1892-1976)

All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest. -Samuel Richardson

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. -Steve Jobs

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

Don’t strive to be perfect. Strive for excellence. -Victoria Principal

Excellence is a process that should occupy all our days. -Ted W. Engstrom

The best is the enemy of the good. -Francois-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778)

BTW, here’s a few (6) discipline quotes you might like.

What do you think of these excellence quotes?  Sometimes I think it’s too stressful to always be striving for perfection in all things; isn’t it ok to just be “good enough”?  What are your thoughts?