Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.
John Ruskin

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.
Benjamin Disraeli

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
George Eliot

Authority is not a quality one person "has," in the sense that he has property or physical qualities. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as somebody superior to him.
Erich Fromm

What is the quality of your intent?
Thurgood Marshall

It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
Robert Louis Stevenson

We must accept life for what it actually is - a challenge to our quality without which we should never know of what stuff we are made, or grow to our full stature.
Robert Louis Stevenson

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
George MacDonald

It's the quality of the ordinary, the straight, the square, that accounts for the great stability and success of our nation. It's a quality to be proud of. But it's a quality that many people seem to have neglected.
Gerald R. Ford

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.
Charles Eames

Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.
Charles Eames

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.
Samuel Beckett

Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Horace Mann

There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.
Herman Melville

Is there some principal of nature which states that we never know the quality of what we have until it is gone?
Herman Melville

The pleasure we derive from the representation of the present is due, not only to the beauty it can be clothed in, but also to its essential quality of being the present.
Charles Baudelaire

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.
Bell Hooks

It's obvious that the key problem facing humanity in the coming century is how to bring a better quality of life - for 8 billion or more people - without wrecking the environment entirely in the attempt.
E. O. Wilson

Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer.
Rick Pitino

Wisdom is the quality that keeps you from getting into situations where you need it.
Doug Larson