excellence quotes

Human good turns out to be activity of soul exhibiting excellence, and if there is more than one sort of excellence, in accordance with the best and most complete.Foroneswallowdoesnot makea summer, nor does one day; and so too one day, or a short time, does not make a man blessed and happy.

-Aristotle
Nicomachean Ethics, bk.1, ch.7,1098 (translated by Sir David Ross).

And he, who servilely creeps after sense, Is safe, but ne'er will reach an excellence.

-John Dryden
  Tyrannic Love, prologue.

One of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.

- F(rancis) Scott Key Fitzgerald
  Of  Tom Buchanan. The Great Gatsby, ch.1.

The definition of happiness of the Greeks†is full use of your powers along lines of excellence. I find, therefore, the Presidency provides some happiness.

-John F(itzgerald) Kennedy
  News conference, 31 Oct.

El orbe hispano nunca se vino abajo, ni siquiera a la ca|da del imperio espan‹  ol, sino que se ha multiplicado en numerosas facetas de ensanches todav|a insospechados† No somos pueblos en estado de candor, que se deslumbren fa  cilmente con los instrumentos externos de que se acompan‹  a la cultura, sino pueblos que heredan una vieja civilizacio  n y exigen la excelencia misma de la cultura. The Hispanic world never crumbled, not even after the Spanish Empire fell, but instead has multiplied itself in broad ways that are still largely unknown† Our people are not naive and are not blinded by the external tools that go together with culture; we are rather the inheritors of an old civilization, and we demand the excellence proper to culture itself.

- Alfonso Reyes
Pa  ginas escogidas,'Valor de la literatura hispanoamericana' (translated as'TheValue of Hispanic American Literature').

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

- Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
  Mysticism and Logic.

This isthe land God gave to Andy Stewartwe have our inheritance. There shall be no ardour, there shall be indifference. There shall not be excellence, there shall be the average. We shall be the intrepid hunters of golf balls.

-A'Ghobhainn
  'TheWhite Air of March'.

I myself have accomplished nothing of excellence except a remarkable and, to some of my friends, unaccountable expertness in hitting empty ginger ale bottles with small rocks at a distance of thirty paces.

-James Grover Thurber
  My Life and HardTimes, preface.

   A balance, an ennobling interchange Of action from without and from within; The excellence, pure function, and best power Both of the object seen, and eye that sees.

-William Wordsworth
^1805  The Prelude, bk.13, l.375^8 (published1850).