Excellence

Excellence is a talent or quality which is unusually good and so surpasses ordinary standards. It is also used as a standard of performance.

Quotes

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul's faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1934 translation by H. Rackham), book 1, chapter 7, section 15, p. 33. President John F. Kennedy often paraphrased this idea. On May 8, 1963, he said to a group of foreign students: "The ancient Greek definition of happiness was the full use of your powers along lines of excellence". The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 380.

We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill.
- Richard Bach, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, (1970).

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; 'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions'; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: 'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy'.
- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (1926), p. 76. The quoted phrases within the quotation are from the Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, 4; Book I, 7.

Zahlreich sind die Lehrkanzeln, aber selten die weisen und edlen Lehrer. Zahlreich und groß sind die Hörsäle, doch wenig zahlreich die jungen Menschen, die ehrlich nach Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit dürsten. Zahlreich spendet die Natur ihre Dutzendware, aber das Feinere erzeugt sie selten.
- Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young men who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.
  - Albert Einstein, “On Academic Freedom,” Ideas and Opinions (1954)

An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
- John W. Gardner, Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too? (1961), p. 86.

All societies need elites. Whether for pilots, brain surgeons, or special forces, at some point an objective standard must be met if we are to maintain excellence.
- Simon Hankinson, "State Department Says Not Adopting DEI Is A ‘National Security Threat’", The Federalist (July 25, 2024)

How miserable is the condition of men when the better a thing is, the further it recedes from our sight and the less it is recognized.
- Philip Melanchthon, "In Praise of Eloquence," as translated by C. Salazar, in Orations on Philosophy and Education (Cambridge University Press: 1999), p. 62

The excellent man is he who condemns what he finds in his mind without previous effort, and only accepts as worthy of him what is still far above him and what requires a further effort in order to be reached.
- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929), p. 63

Warren has a saying, "Intensity is the price of excellence."
- Alice Schroeder, (September 6, 2016)"The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life". Microsoft Research, YouTube. (quote at 17:16 of 56:05)

Difficult, say you? Difficult to be a man of virtue, truly good, shaped and fashioned without flaw in the perfect figure of four-squared excellence, in body and mind, in act and thought?
- Simonides of Ceos, The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles (1920 translation by J. T. Sheppard), Introduction, p. xxxi.

If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?
- Tom Peters, Co-Author of In Search of Excellence

Wiktionary

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