Pastoral Resources

No student ever attains very eminent success by simply doing what is required of him: it is the amount and excellence of what is over and above the required, that determines the greatness of ultimate distinction.

Neither a life of anarchy nor one beneath a despot should you praise; to all that lies in the middle a god has given excellence.

What we do is look for high standards of excellence in the arts.

The sad truth is that excellence makes people nervous.

Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.

The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.

Excellence, then, is a state concerned with choice, lying in a mean, relative to us, this being determined by reason and in the way in which the man of practical wisdom would determine it.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Moral excellence comes about as a result of habit. We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in excellence; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good in themselves.

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

Yet Aristotle's excellence of substance, so far from being associated with the grand style, is associated with something that at times comes perilously near jargon.

Dullness in matters of government is a good sign, and not a bad one - in particular, dullness in parliamentary government is a test of its excellence, an indication of its success.

There is no excellence without labor. One cannot dream oneself into either usefulness or happiness.

There is no surer mark of the absence of the highest moral and intellectual qualities than a cold reception of excellence.

We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started.

Excellence is a better teacher than mediocrity. The lessons of the ordinary are everywhere. Truly profound and original insights are to be found only in studying the exemplary.

I've spent my life pursing excellence as an artist, which is what I always wanted to do anyhow.

It is the growth of advertising in this country which, more than any single element, has brought the American magazine to its present enviable position in points of literary, illustrative and mechanical excellence.

It is the characteristic excellence of the strong man that he can bring momentous issues to the fore and make a decision about them. The weak are always forced to decide between alternatives they have not chosen themselves.