10 Quotes Tagged: standards

Raise your quality standards as high as you can live with, avoid wasting your time on routine problems, and always try to work as closely as possible at the boundary of your abilities. Do this, because it is the only way of discovering how that boundary should be moved forward.

Cynics are - beneath it all - only idealists with awkwardly high standards.

When you're creating an environment to support your goals, remember that you get in life what you tolerate.

[O]ne person's 'barbarian' is another person's 'just doing what everybody else is doing.

God is a mean-spirited, pugnacious bully bent on revenge against His children for failing to live up to his impossible standards.

The affiliation clause in our Constitution is a privilege: a courtesy to a sympathetic body. Were you not a Mason, or Co-Mason, you would have to be proposed and seconded, and then examined by savage Inquisitors, and then — probably — thrown out on the garbage heap. Well, no, it's not as bad as that; but we certainly don't want anybody who chooses to apply. Would you do it yourself, if you were on the Committee of a Club? The O.T.O. is a serious body, engaged on a work of Cosmic scope. You should question yourself: what can I contribute?

"Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self."

[The New Statesman, February 25, 1933]

If you don't set a baseline standard for what you'll accept in life, you'll find it's easy to slip into behaviours and attitudes or a quality of life that's far below what you deserve.

Never apologize for having high standards. People who really want to be in your life will rise up to meet them.

The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again.