13 quotes found
"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."
"We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill."
"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'."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Warren has a saying, "Intensity is the price of excellence.""
"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?"
"Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art...It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of."
"If not excellence, what? If not excellence now, when?"
"Above all, don't be satisfied to do only fairly well what ought to be done very well. Someone is going to do it better than anyone else; why not you?"