Quality Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The most essential mental quality for a free people, whose liberty is to be progressive, permanent and on a large scale, is much stupidity.

But I was right. I think that must be an hereditary quality, for my father says he is scarcely ever wrong.

Elizabeth Gaskell

The mythos. The mythos is insane. That's what he believed. The mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this world is unreal, that is insane!

Robert M. Pirsig

The speed at which we moved the ball in small spaces and our quality was superb. We played the ball through needles and it was very difficult for Aston Villa.

The quality that accompanies the emergence of learning in the evolution of higher animals, namely intelligence, is surprisingly difficult to define.

Positiveness is a good quality for preachers and orators, because he that would obtrude his thoughts and reasons upon a multitude, will convince others the more, as he appears convinced himself.

A photograph can be made with an uncorrected lens, or with no lens at all by making an exposure through a fine needle-hole in a thin metal disc, and the result may be a picture showing the characteristic virtue of photography, the rendering of infinitely delicate gradations of tone. This is where photography stands alone, and this is the distinguishing quality which has given it a place among the fine arts.

In violence there is often the quality of yearning - the yearning for completion. For closure. For that which is absent and would if present bring to fulfillment. For the body without which the wing is a useless frozen ornament. ("A Short Guide To The City")

There has been no lack of courage in Ireland; there never is, but even our courage has a fatal quality.

Susan L. Mitchell

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

Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.

Peter Pronovost

I am great admirer of China. It has shown great discipline and dedication in attacking n export markets. China is working furiously on its English-language capability and its quality control. As China become stronger, it sends a clear signal that we in India have to harder to stay ahead.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

If I had a brick for every time I've repeated the phrase Quality, Service, Cleanliness and Value, I think I'd probably be able to bridge the Atlantic Ocean with them.

There's a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats.

In the practice of any craft, we are less concerned with the quantity of the product than with its quality, and less concerned with the product than with the artisan.

Lanza del Vasto

Disgust is expressed by violence, and it is to be noted of our intellectual temper that violence is a quality which is felt to have a peculiarly intellectual sanction. Our preference, even as articulated by those who are most mild in their persons, is increasingly for the absolute and extreme, of which we feel violence to be the true sign. The gentlest of us will know that the tigers of wrath are to be preferred to the horses of instruction and will consider it intellectual cowardice to take into account what happens to those who ride tigers.

Lionel Trilling

Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.

Whenever you meet anyone, no matter how briefly, do you acknowledge their being by giving them your full attention, or are you reducing them to a means to an end, a mere function or role. What is the quality of your relationship with the cashier at the supermarket, the parking attendant, the repair man, the customer?

Like all power seekers, Pae was amazingly shortsighted. There was a trivial, abortive quality to his mind, it lacked depth, affect, imagination. It was, in fact, a primitive instrument.

Ursula K. Le Guin

It is the deep, salty stickiness of food that intrigues me more than any other quality.

The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

Albert Jay Nock

As a nation, we must choose between the sanctity of life ethic and the "quality of life" ethic. I have no trouble identifying the answer our nation has always given to this basic question, and the answer that I hope and pray it will give in the future.

Does it really work for us to go through our lives as though there were no realizations beyond the grasp of our system-of-concepts, the awareness of which would transform the quality of our lives?

Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.

The poet needs to be deluded about his poems—for who can be sure that it is delusion? In his strongest hours the public hardly exists for the writer; he does what he ought to do, has to do, and if afterwards some Public wishes to come and crown him with laurel crowns, well, let it! if critics wish to tell people all that he isn't, well, let them—he knows what he is. But at night when he can't get to sleep it seems to him that it is what he is, his own particular personal quality, that he is being disliked for. It is this that the future will like him for, if it likes him for anything; but will it like him for anything? The poet's hope is in posterity, but it is a pale hope; and now that posterity itself has become a pale hope...

Randall Jarrell