To excel is to live. [ Beranger ]

Born to excel, and to command!
As by transcendent beauty to attract
All eyes, so by pre-eminence of soul
To rule all hearts. [ Congreve ]

What is excellent,
As God lives, is permanent;
Hearts are dust, hearts' loves remain,
Heart's love will meet thee again. [ Emerson ]

Base envy withers at another's joy,
And hates that excellence it cannot reach. [ Thomson ]

I will this dreary blank of absence make,
A noble task-time, and will therein strive
To follow excellence, and to overtake
More good than I have won since yet I live. [ Francis Kemble ]

Good maxims are the germs of all excellence. [ Joubert ]

As this auspicious day began the race
Of every virtue join'd with every grace;
May you, who own them, welcome its return,
Till excellence, like yours, again is born.
The years we wish, will half your charms impair;
The years we wish the better half will spare;
The victims of your eyes will bleed no more,
But all the beauties of your mind adore. [ Jeffrey ]

There is no excellence uncoupled with difficulties. [ Ovid ]

Mediocrity is excellence to the eyes of mediocre people. [ Joubert ]

The price of excellence is labor, and time that of immortality. [ Fuseli ]

By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property. [ Francois M. A. de Voltaire ]

Ideal excellence, or one's conception of perfection in anything. [ French ]

Moral excellence is the bright consummate flower of all progress. [ Charles Sumner ]

Our minds should be habituated to the contemplation of excellence. [ Joshua Reynolds ]

The highest excellence is seldom attained in more than one vocation. [ C. N. Bovee ]

It is a meaner part of sense to find a fault than taste an excellence. [ Rochester ]

The variation of excellence among men is rather in degree than in kind. [ Bancroft ]

Handsomeness is the more animal excellence, beauty the more imaginative. [ Hare ]

Real excellence, indeed, is most recognized when most openly looked into. [ Plutarch ]

If you want enemies, excel others; if you want friends, let others excel you. [ Colton ]

It is the witness still of excellency to put a strange face on his own perfection. [ William Shakespeare ]

Excellence and greatness of soul are most conspicuously displayed in contempt of riches.

A friend gives himself to his beloved, and the higher his excellence the richer the gift. [ William Ellery Channing ]

When a man appreciates only eating and sleeping, what excellence has he over the reptiles? [ Saadi ]

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, and the hardest in which to reach true excellence. [ Stedman ]

Great patriots must be men of great excellence; this alone can secure to them lasting admiration. [ H. Giles ]

Simplicity in character, in manners, in style: in all things the supreme excellence is simplicity. [ Longfellow ]

Nature and religion are the bands of friendship, excellence and usefulness are its great endearments. [ Jeremy Taylor ]

A man that is desirous to excel should endeavor it in those things that are in themselves most excellent. [ Epictetus ]

Every successive generation becomes a living memorial of our public schools, and a living example of their excellence. [ Joseph Story ]

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

The more we sympathize with excellence, the more we go out of self, the more we love, the broader and deeper is our personality. [ Chapin ]

Those who attain any excellence commonly spend life in one common pursuit; for excellence is not often gained upon easier terms. [ Johnson ]

Those who would attain to any marked degree of excellence in a chosen pursuit must work, and work hard for it, prince or peasant. [ Bayard Taylor ]

The excellence of aphorisms consists not so much in the expression of some rare or abstruse sentiment, as in the comprehension of some useful truth in few words. [ Johnson ]

A maxim is the exact and noble expression of an important and unquestionable truth. Good maxims are the germs of all excellence. When firmly fixed on the memory, they nourish the will. [ Joseph Joubert ]

He who excels in his art so as to carry it to the utmost height of perfection of which it is capable may be said in some measure to go beyond it: his transcendent productions admit of no appellations. [ La Bruyere ]

There is a moral excellence attainable by all who have the will to strive after it; but there is an intellectual and physical superiority which is above the reach of our wishes, and is granted to a few only. [ Crabb ]

God hides some ideal in every human soul. At some time in our life we feel a trembling, fearful longing to do some good thing. Life finds its noblest spring of excellence in this hidden impulse to do our best. [ Robert Collyer ]

Friendship is more firmly secured by lenity toward failings than by attachment to excellence; the former is valued as a kindness, which cannot be claimed; the latter is exalted to the payment of a debt to merit. [ W. B. Clulow ]

Men of the greatest genius are not always the most prodigal of their encomiums. But then it is when their range of power is confined, and they have in fact little perception, except of their own particular kind of excellence. [ Hazlitt ]

No good book or good thing of any sort shows its best face at first; nay, the commonest quality in a true work of art, if its excellence have any depth and compass, is that at first sight it occasions a certain disappointment. [ Carlyle ]

The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. [ B. R. Haydon ]

I would rather be the author of one original thought than conqueror of a hundred battles. Yet moral excellence is so much superior to intellectual, that I ought to esteem one virtue more valuable than a hundred original thoughts. [ W. B. Clulow ]

Fame has no necessary conjunction with praise; it may exist without the breath of a word: it is a recognition of excellence which must be felt, but need not be spoken. Even the envious must feel it, - feel it, and hate in silence. [ Washington Allston ]

To this end, nothing is to be more carefully consulted than plainness. In a lady's attire this is the single excellence: for to be what some people, call fine, is the same vice, in that case, as to be florid is in writing or speaking. [ Addison ]

Human excellence, parted from God, is like a fable flower, which, according to Rabbis, Eve plucked when passing out of paradise - severed from its native root, it is only the touching memorial of a lost Eden; sad, while charming - beautiful, but dead. [ C. Stanford ]

Biography, especially the biography of the great and good, who have risen by their own exertions from poverty and obscurity to eminence and usefulness, is an inspiring and ennobling study. Its direct tendency is to reproduce the excellence it records. [ Horace Mann ]

If there is excellence in my composition, set it down, first of all things and last, to the general fact that I have no method. Modes of expression in writing, like modes of expression in speech, are referable purely to feeling, not studied, but of the moment. [ Gen. Lew Wallace, The Art Of Authorship, 1891 ]

Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and fortune. [ John Knox ]

Remember always in painting, as in eloquence, the greater your strength the quieter will be your manner and the fewer your words; and in painting, as in all the arts and acts of life, the secret of high success will be found, not in a fretful and various excellence, but in a quiet singleness of justly chosen aim. [ Ruskin ]

A few words worthy to be remembered suffice to give an idea of a great mind. There are single thoughts that contain the essence of a whole volume, single sentences that have the beauties of a large work, a simplicity so finished and so perfect that it equals in merit and in excellence a large and glorious composition. [ Joubert ]

Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labor. It argues, indeed, no small strength of mind to persevere in the habits of industry, without the pleasure of perceiving those advantages which, like the bands of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation. [ Sir Joshua Reynolds ]

Excellence in art is to be attained only by active effort, and not by passive impressions; by the manly overcoming of difficulties, by patient struggle against adverse circumstance, by the thrifty use of moderate opportunities. The great artists were not rocked and dandled into eminence, but they attained to it by that course of labor and discipline which no man need go to Rome or Paris or London to enter upon. [ Hillard ]

The desire of excellence is the necessary attribute of those who excel. We work little for a thing unless we wish for it. But we cannot of ourselves estimate the degree of our success in what we strive for; that task is left to others. With the desire for excellence comes, therefore, the desire for approbation. And this distinguishes intellectual excellence from moral excellence; for the latter has no necessity of human tribunal; it is more inclined to shrink from the public than to invite the public to be its judge. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]