Quotes About Quality and Excellence

If you don’t do it excellently, don’t do it at all.  Because if it’s not excellent, it won’t be profitable or fun, and if you’re not in business for fun or profit, what the hell are you doing there?

— Robert Townsend

What the crowd requires is mediocrity of the highest order.

— Antoine-Auguste Préault

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty . . . but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

As there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous, so also there is but one from the ridiculous to the sublime.

— Samuel Butler

Give me the luxuries of life and I will willingly do without the necessities.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

— Mark Twain

Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best.

— Max Beerbohm

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is no perfectly Epicurean corner; there is no perfectly irresponsible place.  Everywhere men have made the way for us with sweat and submission.  We may fling ourselves  into a hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.  But we are glad that the netmaker did not make the hammock in a fit of divine carelessness.

— G. K. Chesterton

Good is not good, where better is expected.

— Thomas Fuller

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

— Emile Zola

There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper.

— John Ruskin

It is a funny thing about life: if you refuse to accept anything but the best you very often get it.

— W. Somerset Maugham

It isn’t evil that’s running the earth, but mediocrity.  The crime is not that Nero played while Rome burned, but that he played badly.

— Ned Rorem

The secret of joy in work is contained in one word--excellence.  To know how to do something well is to enjoy it.

— Pearl Buck

All I want is the best of everything, and there’s very little of that left.

— Lucius Beebe

The true test of civilization is not the census, not size of cities, but the kind of man that the country turns out.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not much meat on her, but what’s there is choice.

— Spencer Tracy, about Katharine Hepburn

A perfectionist is a man who takes infinite pains and gives them to others.

— Alan Benner

First-rate people hire first-rate people; second-rate people hire third-rate people.

— Leo Rosten

The road to business success is paved by those who continually strive to produce better products or services.  It does not have to be a great technological product like television.  Ray Kroc of McDonald’s fame did it with a simple hamburger.

— G. Kingsley Ward

Quality is not an act.  It is a habit.

— Aristotle

My parents always told me that people will never know how long it takes you to do something.  They will only know how well it is done.

— Nancy Hanks