Quotes about Uncommon Excellence

Henry J. Heinz

To do a common thing uncommonly well brings success.

Baltasar Gracian

Attain and maintain a reputation, for it is the usufruct of fame. A stiff climb, for it is the issue of excellence, as rare as mediocrity is common.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One must shed the bad taste of wanting to agree with many. "Good" is no longer good when one's neighbor mouths it. And how should there be a "common good"! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value. In the end it must be as it is and always has been: great things remain for the great, abysses for the profound, nuances and shudders for the refined, and, in brief, all that is rare for the rare.

William Allen White

Greatness, generally speaking, is an unusual quantity of a usual quality grafted upon a common man.

Henry J. Heinz

The secret of success is to do a common thing uncommonly well.

In the early 20th century, Heinz’s food company had remarkably high standards of cleanliness, health and safety. It as a time where his competition was not other food manufacturers but the vast fear of Americans that packaged food could not be trusted to be safe, much less healthy was what hampered sales. When Theodore Roosevelt introduced the concept of Federal food safety regulation, every major food company was vehemently opposed except for Heinz who claimed that the greatest beneficiary of Federal inspection would be the commercial food industry. He was right, but ironically Heinz was an example of the company that did not need Federal regulation to meet reasonable standards of public safety.

Leo Burnett

Keep it simple. Let's do the obvious thing -the common thing- but let's do it uncommonly well.

Edward Gibbon

The aspiring efforts of genius, or virtue, either in active or speculative life, are measured, not so much by their real elevation, as by the height to which they ascend above the level of their age and country; and the same stature, which in a people of giants would pass unnoticed, must appear conspicuous in a race of pygmies.

William Godwin

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.

Uncommon Excellence Quotes