Quotes & Sayings About Quality Of Work

This was the greatest gift that he had, the talent that fitted him for war; that ability not to ignore but to despise whatever bad ending there could be. This quality was destroyed by too much responsibility for others or the necessity of undertaking something ill planned or badly conceived. For in such things the bad ending, failure, could not be ignored. It was not simply a possibility of harm to one's self, which could be ignored. He knew he himself was nothing, and he knew death was nothing. He knew that truly, as truly as he knew anything. In the last few days he had learned that he himself, with another person, could be everything. But inside himself he knew that this was the exception. That we have had, he thought. In that I have been most fortunate. That was given to me, perhaps, because I never asked for it. That cannot be taken away nor lost. But that is over and done with now on this morning and what there is to do now is our work. — Ernest Hemingway,

I like being on a set where you can make decisions and everything is involved and are happy to work together to make the best work. For me, it's all about making the best work and creative people working together and all being respected and all having their opinions of what gives it the best quality is important. — Aneurin Barnard

They disregard the quality of immediate experience, and base their motivation instead on the strongly rooted cultural stereotype of what work is supposed to be like. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

being then just dinner-time, we went, first into the great kitchen, where every prisoner's dinner was in course of being set out separately (to be handed to him in his cell), with the regularity and precision of clock-work. I said aside, to Traddles, that I wondered whether it occurred to anybody, that there was a striking contrast between these plentiful repasts of choice quality, and the dinners, not to say of paupers, but of soldiers, sailors, labourers, the great bulk of the honest, working community; of whom not one man in five hundred ever dined half so well. But I learned that the 'system' required high living; and, in short, to dispose of the system, once for all, I found that on that head and on all others, 'the system' put an end to all doubts, and disposed of all anomalies. Nobody appeared to have the least idea that there was any other system, but THE system, to be considered. — Charles Dickens

In two-parent households, women have increasingly entered the workplace, and in single-parent households, there is even more of a need for the adults to work. That means parents do not fully control their own schedule and have to scramble to find high-quality after-school options. — Geoffrey Canada

I love the new technology in terms of giving access to doing more independent work. When I first started out, any film had to rent from Panavision and the expenses were humongous. Now, given the advances in technology, you can put out extraordinary quality filmmaking at nothing like the price it used to be. — Kathleen Turner

Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature. — George Gissing

Women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called 'fascination.' Coming of age in the 1920's was a competitive business ... — Susan Cain

There needs to be bolder thinking, ... on how to measure the quality of life of men and women in the work force. Currently, success is measured by material advancements. We need to readjust the definition of success to account for time outside of work and satisfaction of life, not just the dollars-and-cents bottom line. — Betty Friedan

The fact is that your productivity begins to decline after eight or nine hours of work. For this reason, working long hours into the night, although it is sometimes necessary, means that you are usually producing less and less in more and more time. The more tired you become, the worse the quality of your work will be and the more mistakes you will make. At a certain point, you can reach "the wall" and simply be unable to continue, like a battery that is run down. — Brian Tracy

An outdated view still prevails that a low-carbon lifestyle requires immense personal suffering and sacrifice. In my view, nothing could be further from the truth. All the evidence shows that people who do not drive, do not fly on planes, do shop locally, do grow their own food, and do get to know other members of their community have a much higher quality of life than their compatriots who still persist in making the ultimate sacrifice of wasting their lives commuting to work in cars. — Mark Lynas

There's competition in every field, and that's healthy. It makes you work harder and be your best. Competition, not in terms of money or number of projects, but in the quality of your work, is very healthy. — Katrina Kaif

I've always been a contrarian of sorts. I'm not exactly sure where this quality comes from. I am among the approximately 13 percent of people who are left-handed, and a great deal has been written about the differences in the ways southpaws process ideas and motivations. In any event, always fitting in or going with the crowd has never been a big concern for me if my head and heart lay elsewhere. Admittedly, my inclination to stray from the pack didn't go over too well with my drill sergeant. My armed forces stint offered many lessons, one of which was that if I was to be successful as an individual in whatever I chose to do, I would have to work, and think, independently. — Charles Brandes

INDIE AUTHOR= A writer growing, learning, developing their trade-set based on skills they are acquiring along their journey. (They are not in training or less professional. They are simply working with their own allowances of income with financial support far from the more broader publisher's stature to try to produce the best quality of work for you the reader.) — Eri Nelson

All I can do in my writing is to stimulate a certain amount of thought, clarify some technical facts and date my work. But when I preach sharpness, brilliancy, scale, etc., I am just mouthing words, because no words can really describe those terms and qualities it takes the actual print to say, here it is. — Ansel Adams

Consider the situation: Money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. — Tim Harford

I just want to work hard, do stuff of the best possible quality and be a great friend. — Suki Waterhouse

If you want to build a factory, or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured, dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn't enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. — Robert M. Pirsig

One of the Scrum rules is that work cannot be pushed onto a team; the Product Owner offers items for the iteration, and the team pulls as many as they decide they can do at a sustainable pace with good quality. — Craig Larman

I don't think I would live outside of the Northwest. I think the quality of life in Portland is really good. People move from intense, high-powered jobs, and move to Portland, work half as much and live twice as good. — Carrie Brownstein

Care and Quality are internal and external aspects of the same thing. A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who's bound to have some characteristic of quality. — Robert M. Pirsig

You ask whether a woman should be paid the same wages as man when she does the same work? To this, there can be but one answer. If she does the same quantity and quality of work under the same conditions as a man, simple justice requires that she should be paid the same. wages. To deny her this is to deny her justice. — John Peter Altgeld

It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity. — Mahatma Gandhi

Influence could get me inside the door, but my productivity and the quality of my work were the real tests. — Ben Carson

The best test of the quality of a civilization is the quality of its leisure. — Irwin Edman

I intend to work for this dance of the future. I do not know whether I have the necessary qualities; I may have neither genius nor talent nor temperament. But I know that I have a Will; and will and energy sometimes prove greater than either genius or talent or temperament. — Isadora Duncan

In our culture we tend to equate thinking and intellectual powers with success and achievement. In many ways, however, it is an emotional quality that separates those who master a field from the many who simply work at a job. Our levels of desire, patience, persistence, and confidence end up playing a much larger role in success than sheer reasoning powers. Feeling motivated and energized, we can overcome almost anything. Feeling bored and restless, our minds shut off and we become increasingly passive. — Robert Greene

It is only by loving nature, and going to her for everything, that good work can be done; but then we must look to her for the materials for pictures, not for pictures themselves. It is nature filtered through the mind and fingers of the artist that produces art, and the quality of the pictures depends on the fineness of that filter. — Henry Peach Robinson

It [9/11 event] transcended the political and moved into the metaphysical. There was a kind of cosmic, demonic quality of mind at work here, which refused to have any interest in dialogue and political organization and persuasion. — Edward Said

It is impossible to think of a man of any actual force and originality, universally recognized as having those qualities, who spent his whole life appraising and describing the work of other men. — H.L. Mencken

Yes, there are Spirits of Music whose work is to inspire humanity with the selfless and spiritual quality of Music. Music represents the selfless and spiritual aspect of existence. Music is invisible, like the Spirit, or like the Air that we cannot see, but which is all around us. The Spirits of Music permeate the air of the earth, creating melodies and harmonies for all to hear. They are in every tune or song that you hear. They are also within you. — David Cherubim

We often tend to think that the executive wishes to maintain standard, wishes to reach a certain quality of production, and that the worker has to be goaded in some way to do this. Again and again we forget that the worker is often, usually I think, equally interested, that his greatest pleasure in his work comes from the satisfaction of worthwhile accomplishment, of having done the best of which he was capable. — Mary Parker Follett

My take on all these things is pretty simple. It's all on the table, every bit of it, and you should use anything that improves the quality of your wiring and doesn't get in the way of your story. If you like an alliterative phrases-the knights of nowhere battling the nabobs of nullity-by all means throw it in and see how it looks on paper. If it seems to work, it can stay. If it doesn't (and to me this one sounds pretty bad, like Spiro Agnew crossed with Robert Jordan), well that delete key is on your machine for a good reason. — Stephen King

A work of art rests its merits in traditional qualities. It may constitute a remarkable feat in craftsmanship; it may be a searching study of psychological states; it may be a nostalgic glance backward; it may be any one of an infinite number of concepts, none of which may have any possible bearing upon its degree of newness. — Ben Shahn

Rule: It is the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time at home that matters. — Brian Tracy

Asking questions doesn't mean you don't know your job, asking questions means you want to improve the quality of your work. — Robert Allen

There's a lot of great stuff on television and that's very appealing to actors who want to work, who do good quality and high quality work. But you're always concerned that the time demands on television will interrupt or interfere with your film work. — Wesley Snipes

Possibly the biggest issue, however, is that performance appraisals focus managers attention on precisely the wrong thing: individual people. As W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught a long time ago, company performance often results more from variations in systems than from the individuals doing the work. — Jeffrey Pfeffer

I thought I should work more on the idea that you wear a suit or a jacket because of the fun it can provide, because it's a game, because it might even have a sexual quality. — Hedi Slimane

Let them imitate and imitate - and learn and learn.
... who has not seen a young painter in a museum intently copying a Vermeer or a van Gogh, and believing himself on the way to learning something valuable?
Emotional freedom, the integrity and special quality of one's work - are not first things, but final things. Only the patient and diligent, as well as the inspired, get there. — Mary Oliver

Spontaneity in the therapeutic work arises when the therapist can allow creative and authentic impulses to arise from moment to moment from the inner being, from the meditative quality within, from the inner emptiness, from the capacity to surrender to life. Then the therapist becomes less of a technician and more of an artist in the therapeutic work. It is then when the therapist and client meets in awareness without any barrier between. — Swami Dhyan Giten

Yes. However, remember - productivity is more than just the quantity of work done. It is also the quality. — Kenneth H. Blanchard

Many or few alternatives can be at hand. A wise and skilful choice acts from a sincere effort. Solutions and results come from cooperation, hard work and efficiency. With high intention matched with a flexible, patient heart and proficient action gets best quality and value. As for the restless grumbles raving from unconsciousness of complexity of matters, best be brushed off ducking out wisely from discourtesies. — Angelica Hopes

Included with the basic package is five hour reception coverage, a photo montage at the beginning of the video, and a highlight recap at the end. The photo montage includes up to 25 customer supplied pictures and an invitation, set to music along with titling and serves as the opening to the video. The photo montage is prepared ahead of time, days before the reception but it is not intended to be shown at the reception. Rather it is intended to be a professional quality introduction to the your fully edited video and it will distinguish your work from that of non-professionals. The highlight recap is similar to the photo montage as they are both set to music, but the recap is composed of short snippets of video that you shot from the event, rather than photos that were supplied by the customer. The finished edited video is comprised of three main parts; the photo montage, the main body, and the highlight recap. The entire video is typically two hours in duration. — Jeffrey Goldberg

I think that we've got a huge head start on things that are not easy to do: progressive streaming, to be able to stream in very high quality, even in an environment of highly variable bit rate, and to work on a big variety of devices seamlessly. — Ted Sarandos

Real progress in the Christian life is not gauged by our knowledge of scripture, our church attendance, time in prayer, or even our witnessing (although it isn't less than these things) Maturity in the Christian life is measured by only one test: how much closer to his character have we become? the result of the Spirit's work is more not more activity. No, the results of his work are in in our quality of life, they are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. — Elyse M. Fitzpatrick

I focus on faculty, as opposed to facilities, budgets, endowments or students. I do so because I believe, based on many decades of work as a teacher, a scholar and an administrator, that the quality of the faculty determines the quality of the university. Everything else flows from the quality of the faculty. If the faculty are good, you will attract good students and you will have alumni who will raise funds for you. — Henry Rosovsky

Because of my age and because there's more work on the small screen. What it's missing in quality it makes up for in quantity. From an actor's selfish point of view. — Cesar Romero

We need to accept that consumption is not the end goal of our life and stop measuring our well-being simply on the basis of earnings. We need to explicitly take the quality of our work-related life into account in judging our well-being. — Ha-Joon Chang

It is this quality, the power of seeing order in apparent confusion, that has marked the work of all great men. — John Chadwick

secret codicils would allow the German Army to illegally rearm and train on Russian territory throughout the twenties and thirties. Tens of thousands of German "work commandos" would come to Russia in 1923 and begin experimenting in the new, still theoretical technique of the blitzkrieg, the idea that small, high-quality, mobile forces backed by airpower could overcome a country before it could react. — Tom Reiss

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work. — James McNeill Whistler

What you of the CHOAM directorate seem unable to understand is that you seldom find real loyalties in commerce ... Men must want to do things of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organisations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work, every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you overorganize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses. — Frank Herbert

I believe that all creativity and consciousness is born in the quality of play, as opposed to work, in the quickened intuitional spontaneity that I see as a constant through all my own existences, and in the experience of those I know. — Seth

From the vantage point of the brain, doing well in school and at work involves one and the same state, the brain's sweet spot for performance. The biology of anxiety casts us out of that zone for excellence. "Banish fear" was a slogan of the late quality-control guru W. Edwards Deming. He saw that fear froze a workplace: workers were reluctant to speak up, to share new ideas, or to coordinate well, let alone to improve the quality of their output. The same slogan applies to the classroom - fear frazzles the mind, disrupting learning. — Daniel Goleman

Leadership is a process that involves setting a PURPOSE AND DIRECTION which inspires people to combine and work towards willingly; paying attention to the MEANS, PACE AND QUALITY OF PROGRESS towards the aim; and upholding GROUP UNITY and INDIVIDUAL EFFECTIVENESS throughout. — James Scouller

I love to work out and really enjoy the outdoors. I like to immerse myself with sport-related activities and spending quality time with people. I find people to be very inspiring, and I get a lot of motivation from listening and interacting with them, sharing stories and similarities - and differences - in our lives, and learning from each other. — Apolo Ohno

In recent years, we've become enamored with our own past success. Lulled into complacency by the glitter of our own achievements. We've become accustomed to the title of Military Superpower, forgetting the qualities that got us there. We've become accustomed to our economic dominance in the world, forgetting that it wasn't reckless deals and get rich quick schemes that got us where we are, but hard work and smart ideas, quality products and wise investments. — Barack Obama

The purpose of continuous repentance in the life of a quality man is not a return to the crisis of salvation but part of what the Bible calls sanctification. Repentance is the choice to embrace the Holy Spirit's daily work of convicting us about ongoing sin. If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. — James MacDonald

Do not wait for enough time or money to accomplish what you think you have in mind. Work with what you have right now. Work with the people around you right now ... . Do not wait for what you assume is the appropriate, stress-free environment in which to generate expression ... . Do not wait till you are sure that you know what you are doing ... . What you do now, what you make of your present circumstances, will determine the quality and scope of your future endeavors. — Anne Bogart

Just getting something to work usually means writing reams of code fast, like a Stephen King novel, but making it maintainable and high-quality code that really expresses the ideas well, is like writing poetry. Art is taking away. — Erik Naggum

You don't need to know someone personally to be able to discern whether their work is high quality or not. The idea of a meritocracy is that it's what they do, not who they are. — Matt Mullenweg

Our nation declared a war on people trapped in racially segregated ghettos - just at the moment their economies had collapsed - rather than providing community investment, quality education, and job training when work disappeared. Of course those communities are suffering from serious crime and dysfunction today. Did we expect otherwise? Did we think that, miraculously, they would thrive? — Michelle Alexander

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured. — Ernest Hemingway,

You have the need and the right to spend part of your life caring for your soul. It is not easy. You have to resist the demands of the work-oriented, often defensive, element in your psyche that measures life only in terms of output - how much you produce - not in terms of the quality of your life experiences. To be a soulful person means to go against all the pervasive, prove-yourself values of our culture and instead treasure what is unique and internal and valuable in yourself and your own personal evolution. — Jean Shinoda Bolen

Paradox is an overrated threat. There is ... a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference."
I frowned. "There's ... a law of conservation of history? — Jim Butcher

When you choose a language, youre also choosing a community. The programmers youll be able to hire to work on a Java project wont be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python. And the quality of your hackers probably matters more than the language you choose. Though, frankly, the fact that good hackers prefer Python to Java should tell you something about the relative merits of those languages. — Philip Greenspun

I think there's a quality of passion to the American actor. I'm certainly attracted to it, and I like to hope that underscoring it is a characteristic of my work. That quality is certainly also present in some British actors, but I tend to feel the mechanical and intellectual process is dominant in the British. — Arthur Penn

Sometimes when you work in advertising you'll get a product that's really garbage and you have to make it seem fantastic, something that is essential to the continued quality of life. — Augusten Burroughs

I don't worry about maintaining the quality of my life, because every day I work on improving it. — Tony Robbins

It's thought of as an eccentric thing for an actor to really try to maintain quality control through the whole career. Most people think, 'You just work. You just keep working.' And in some ways I wish I could be a guy who's just a workhorse. — John C. Reilly

Taste and style is beyond clothes. It's in food; it's in quality. Working out, healthy bodies, organic food-they're all part of the same thing. — Kanye West

From the first time he'd met her, he'd sensed an air of contradiction about her. She was very much a woman, but still retained a waiflike quality. She could be brash, and at times deliberately suggestive, yet she was painfully shy. She was incredibly easy to get along with, yet she had few friends. She was a talented artist in her own right, but so self-conscious about her work that she rarely completed a piece and preferred to work with other people's art and ideas ... — Charles De Lint

Even before it opened its retail arm, Beigh was renowned among pashmina cognoscenti for the quality and complexity of the work produced in its workshop, a large, airy, sunlit rectangle of a room directly across from its second-floor shop. — Hanya Yanagihara

Independent contractors - a rapidly growing piece of the workforce - can often achieve the best quality of life. They can choose from where they work, whom they work for and for how long. — Maynard Webb

It wasn't until I began to work on my inner life and know myself that my life changed. Success really does begin within. The size and quality of your outer life is only limited by the size and quality of your inner life. — Robin Sharma

Read your work aloud, if you can, if you aren't too embarrassed by the sound of your voice ringing out when you are alone in a room. Chances are that the sentence you can hardly pronounce without stumbling is a sentence that needs to be reworked to make it smoother and more fluent. A poet once told me that he was reading a draft of a new poem aloud to himself when a thief broke into his Manhattan loft. Instantly surmising that he had entered the dwelling of a madman, the thief turned and ran without taking anything, and without harming the poet. So it maybe that reading your work aloud will not only improve its quality but save your life in the process. — Francine Prose

I'd write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself- like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva- where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there's a little fire burning in there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W's soul, which is with him as he is making his passage..there's a leavetaking in process, a movement towards increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that-like a day or two when he couldn't just let go and float on the energies of other people, who are bearing him up-but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There's enough love around him to carry him now ... — Mark Doty

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that. — Thelma Schoonmaker

Like everyone else, I try to do quality work with great directors. But much of it has to do with luck. — Dermot Mulroney

Much of the cause of the teacher attrition rate is the condition under which many teachers work. "The data suggest that school staffing problems are rooted in the way schools are organized and the way the teaching occupation is treated and that lasting improvements in the quality and quantity of the teaching workforce will require improvements in the quality of the teaching job."39 — Ken Robinson

When a photographer masters the tools and processes of the art, then the quality of the work is only limited by his creative vision. — Edward Weston

Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability ... It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave. — Mark Kingwell

When I stay focused and honest about who I am and the image that I hope to portray, then I won't find myself stranded in unfamiliar territory chasing money or popularity. If the work that you do is quality, then you'll be rewarded. It's also good to stretch musically within the realm of your ability, but not if it compromises your integrity. — Oleta Adams

I don't really ask of myself a given word or page count or number of hours. To work every day, that's my only fetish. And there is a physical quality to it when a novel is thriving. — Jonathan Lethem

I write for myself, and perhaps for half a dozen friends. And that should be enough. And that might improve the quality of my writing. But if I were writing for thousands of people, then I would write what might please them. And as I know nothing about them, and maybe I'd have a rather low opinion of them, I don't think that would do any good to my work. — Jorge Luis Borges

To do six to 10 episodes of high-quality writing, and then be able to go direct my own things, and do a movie, if it comes along, sure. I just want to act and do good work. — Jason Momoa

Through job creation, quality public services and better working conditions, people, communities and countries can lift themselves out of poverty, improve livelihoods, engage in local development and live together in peace. This happens only when work is decent - environmentally sound and productive - provides fair wages, and is underpinned by rights — Sharan Burrow

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: If I was saved by my good works
then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace
at God's infinite cost
then there's nothing he cannot ask of me. — Timothy Keller

We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece. — Simon McBurney

1. Define and articulate the role and functions of social work in end-of-life care in a consistent manner across all settings. 2. Address negative public and professional perceptions of social work internally and externally. 3. Identify and articulate specific and unique contributions of the social work profession in end-of-life care. 4. Facilitate and promote end-of-life social work research that demonstrates the utility and efficiency of social work in hospice. 5. Facilitate collaborative advocacy at the macro level to ensure access to quality interdisciplinary end-of-life care for all people. 6. Actively challenge shortsighted cost-saving initiatives that minimize the psychosocial and spiritual components of care for patients and families. 7. Develop standards for effective models of practice in end-of-life care. — Joan N. Berzoff

After a lifetime of hounding authors for advice, I've heard three truths from every mouth: (1) Writing is painful
it's 'fun' only for novices, the very young, and hacks; (2) other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision; (3) the best revisers often have reading habits that stretch back before the current age, which lends them a sense of history and raises their standards for quality. — Mary Karr

Rejection has nothing to do with the quality of your work. If you believe in your product, it's just a matter of time before someone publishes it. My trick was this: send out ten letters to agents or publishers. Each time you receive a rejection, send out another three. Repeat until you've achieved what you desire. — Noah Charney

I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to "buy" a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don't work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will - all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based. — Stephen R. Covey

But one of the rules I don't like to break is we still do - 95% of our movies are low budget. We're offered bigger, larger budget movies to produce a lot, and we don't do them. That's not to say there aren't exceptions, there are a few exceptions, but I try and stick by the rules that produce what I think is the highest quality, most innovative work and try and let the rules go that make us feel like we're retreading. — Jason Blum

The starting point of enlightenment, a goal that every person should strive for, is inner leadership. Leadership is far more than something businesspeople do at work. Leadership is all about personal responsibility, self-discovery, and creating value in the world by the people we become. Too many people spend their time blaming others for all that isn't working in their lives. We blame our spouses for our unhappy home lives; we blame our bosses for our distress at work; we blame strangers on the freeway for making us angry; we blame our parents for keeping us small. Blame, blame, blame, blame. But blaming others is nothing more than excusing yourself. Blaming others for the current quality of your life is a sad way to live. In doing so, all you're doing is playing the victim. — Robin S. Sharma

I wasn't a babe in the woods. I'd watched a lot of stars, from James Dean to Brando, and I'd seen everybody alive work at MGM. I had a certain old-timer's quality, even though I was young and new, and drew on what I believed before I made it. — Jack Nicholson

Sit quietly, on your own or with others, and decide where you wish to send the energy and what quality you wish to send. 2. Place your hands in front of you as if they were holding a ball. 3. Ask the angels to work with you. 4. Focus on seeing the quality that you wish to send filling the ball you are holding. As you do so, hum softly and imagine a colour expanding the ball. 5. When your humming ball is vibrating with the qualities and love you wish to offer, picture the person to whom you are projecting it, and imagine them receiving it. (You can also mentally throw humming balls to places, situations or people you have never met.) 6. Close down by touching each chakra in turn, and placing a cross or other symbol of protection that is meaningful to you, over them. — Diana Cooper

Friends," he began, "fellow citizens of the Federation, I have tonight a unique honor and privilege. Since the triumphant return of our trail-blazing ship Champion - " He continued in a few thousand well-chosen words to congratulate the citizens of Earth on their successful contact with another planet, another civilized race. He managed to imply that the exploit of the Champion was the personal accomplishment of every citizen of the Federation, that any one of them could have led the expedition had he not been busy with other serious work - and that he, Secretary Douglas, had been chosen by them as their humble instrument to work their will. The flattering notions were never stated baldly, but implied; the underlying assumption being that the common man was the equal of anyone and better than most - and that good old Joe Douglas embodied the common man. Even his mussed cravat and cowlicked hair had a "just folks" quality. — Robert A. Heinlein

Although everyone does benefit from lower-priced goods and services, people also care greatly about the chance to be productively employed and the quality of their work. Declining employment opportunities feel real and immediate; the rise in real incomes brought by lower prices does not. — Michael Spence