All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, said a wise man. If so, what happens to excellence when we eliminate the difficulty and the rarity?

Be extraordinary in your excellence, if you like, but be ordinary in your display of it.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

O be less beautiful, or be less brief.

You cannot make yourself exceptional and live a normal life. To make yourself exceptional, you must live an exceptional life.

You must become the exception.

It is not among extraordinary and fantastic things that excellence is to be found, of whatever kind it may be. We rise to attain it and become removed from it: it is oftenest necessary to stoop for it.

What is the "extraordinary"? It is the love of Jesus Christ himself, love that goes to the cross in suffering obedience. It is the cross. The peculiar feature of Christian life is precisely this cross, a cross enabling Christians to go beyond the world, as it were, thereby granting them victory over the world. Suffering encountered in the love of the one who is crucified — that is the "extraordinary" in Christian existence. The Extraordinary is without doubt that visible element over which the Father in heaven is praised. It cannot remain hidden; people must see it.

There’s nothing wrong with ordinary. I just prefer to shoot for extraordinary.

Live authentically. Why would you continue to compromise something that's beautiful to create something that is fake?

Beauty should be edible, or not at all.

Time wasted rationalizing the mediocre could be time spent creating the magnificent.

What is false creates taste, and reinforces itself by knowingly eliminating any possible reference to the authentic. And what is genuine is reconstructed as quickly as possible, to resemble the false.

Find the ideal in something not ideal.

The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all.