If you desire a man to tell you comfortable lies about your prowess, and so fetter any hope of true excellence, I'm sure you may find one anywhere. Not all prisons are made of iron bars. Some are made of feather beds.
Lois McMaster Bujold
Excellence does not begin in Washington.
Ronald Reagan
All who have achieved excellence in art possess one thing in common; that is, a mind to be one with nature, throughout the seasons.
Matsuo Bash
With regard to excellence, it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it.
Aristotle
All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.
Martin Luther King Jr
A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pride separates excellence from mediocrity
Natalie
To enjoy the things we ought, and to hate the things we ought, has the greatest bearing on excellence of character.
Aristotle
Cricket at the highest level has never been simply a demonstration of sporting excellence; it has always been about winning and losing.
James Coldham
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
The idea for which this nation stands will not survive if the highest goal free man can set themselves is an amiable mediocrity. Excellence implies striving for the highest standards in every phase of life.
John W. Gardner
A virtuous expediency, then, seems the highest desirable or attainable earthly excellence for the mass of men, and is the only earthly excellence that their Creator intended for them.
Herman Melville
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The love of fame is almost another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority, that of time.
William Hazlitt
There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness
Liberty Hyde Bailey