Thoroughness Quotes

• Thoroughness characterizes all successful men. Genius is the art of taking infinite pains. All great achievement has been characterized by extreme care, infinite painstaking, even to the minutest detail.

  Elbert Hubbard

  Art, Pain, Successful

  97 Copy quote

• Employ every economy consistent with thoroughness, accuracy and reliability.

  Arthur Nielsen

  Reliability, Economy, Consistent

  77 Copy quote

• She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

  Sinclair Lewis

  Mind, Details

  'Babbitt' (1922) ch. 18

  65 Copy quote

  Show source

• The greatest felony in the news business today is to be behind, or to miss a big story. So speed and quantity substitute for thoroughness and quality, for accuracy and context.

  Carl Bernstein

  Missing, Quality, News

  "The failures of the press". The Guardian, June 3, 1992.

  70 Copy quote

  Show source

• Nothing truly convincing - which would possess thoroughness, vigor, and skill - has been written against the ancients as yet; especially not against their poetry.

  Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

  Skills, Vigor, Literature

  67 Copy quote

• There is large difference between indolent impatience of labor and intellectual impatience of delay, large difference between leaving things unfinished because we have more to do or because we are satisfied with what we have done.

  John Ruskin

  Differences, Leaving, Intellectual

  John Ruskin (1855). “Modern Painters: pt. 4. Of many things”, p.82

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

  Ezekiel Emanuel

  School, Medical, Graduates

  "Obama's Health Rationer-in-Chief" by Betsy McCaughey, www.wsj.com. August 27, 2009.

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• Whatever work you undertake, do it seriously, thoroughly and well; never leave it half-done or undone, never feel yourself satisfied unless and until you have given it your very best. Cultivate the habits of discipline and toleration. Surrender not the convictions you hold dear but learn to appreciate the points of view of your opponents.

  Syama Prasad Mukherjee

  Motivational, Work, Views

  Speech delivered at Scottish Church College, Kolkata, December 7, 1935.

  91 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you care to be a master or to make a true success of your profession, the smallest detail of your work must be done with thoroughness. To be thorough in medicine means that in the ever alluring present, we do not forget the past.

  David Murray Cowie

  Mean, Past, Medicine

  21 Copy quote

• Reaching toward perfection in any one thing should lift us higher in all things; it should beget a habit of application and thoroughness.

  Julia McNair Wright

  Perfection, Effort, Habit

  Julia McNair Wright (1895). “Ideal Homes, Or, Our Golden Mile-stones ...: A Volume of Practical Experices, Popularly Illustrated : Embracing All the Interests of the Household”

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.

  William Osler

  Art, Humility, Grace

  Sir William Osler, Classics of Medicine Library (1985). “The philosophical essays”

  96 Copy quote

  Show source

• I love thoroughness. I respect people that do a job well.

  Micah Lexier

  Jobs, People, Wells

  "A Believer Excerpt From Sheila Heti’s Interview With Artist Micah Lexier". Interview with Sheila Heti, www.mcsweeneys.net. October 11, 2013.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Accept business only at a price permitting thoroughness. Then do a thorough job, regardless of cost to us.

  Arthur Nielsen

  Jobs, Cost, Thorough

  4 Copy quote

• The pace at eBay was frantic and urgent. We knew that if we didn't move fast, somebody would come into the market and quash us. Participant doesn't make a lot of sense from a financial investment perspective, so it's unlikely that other people will be approaching the business in the same way. So you see less urgency; you see a thoroughness and willingness to spend extra time to get things right. Which I think is really important.

  Jeffrey Skoll

  Business, Moving, Thinking

  "The Indie Movie Mogul". Interview with Michael S. Malone, www.wired.com. February 1, 2006.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look.

  Christian Rudder

  Fighting, Data, Age

  Christian Rudder (2014). “Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves”, p.16, Crown

  45 Copy quote

  Show source

• If I were to give a summary of the tendency of our times, I would say, Quantity. The multitude, the mass spirit, dominates everywhere, destroying quality. Our entire life--production, politics, and education--rests on quantity, on numbers. The worker who once took pride in the thoroughness and quality of his work, has been replaced by brainless, incompetent automatons, who turn out enormous quantities of things, valueless to themselves, and generally injurious to the rest of mankind. Thus quantity, instead of adding to life's comforts and peace, has merely increased man's burden.

  Emma Goldman

  Pride, Men, Numbers

  Emma Goldman (2012). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.69, Courier Corporation

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

  John Ruskin

  Art, Food, Mean

  17 Copy quote

• No other book has been so chopped, knifed, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles lettres of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet?

  Bernard Ramm

  Philosophy, Book, Psychology

  7 Copy quote

• So, from generation to generation, the spiritual church is rising upwards toward its perfection; and, though one after another the workmen pass away, the fabric remains, and the great Master-builder carries on the undertaking. Be it ours to build in our portion in a solid and substantial manner, so that they who come after us may be at once thankful for our thoroughness, and inspired by our example.

  William Mackergo Taylor

  Spiritual, Perfection, Passing Away

  "Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers" by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 144, 1895.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Spiritual, Men

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated)”, p.1698, Delphi Classics

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• To be a biographer is a somewhat peculiar endeavor. It seems to me it requires not only the tact, patience, and thoroughness of a scholar but the stamina of a horse.

  Nancy Milford

  Horse, Peculiar, Endeavor

  Nancy Milford (2001). “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay”, p.11, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The dogmatism of science has become a new orthodoxy, disseminated by the Media and a State educational system with a thoroughness and subtlety far exceeding anything of the kind achieved by the Inquisition; to the point that to believe today in a miraculous happening like the Virgin Birth is to appear a kind of imbecile.

  Malcolm Muggeridge

  Educational, Believe, Media

  Malcolm Muggeridge (1985). “Vintage Muggeridge: religion and society”, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

  25 Copy quote

  Show source

• Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspectthey differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields.

  Robert Frost

  Book, Artist, Annoyed

  "The Figure a Poem Makes". Essay by Robert Frost, 1939.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As I write in 2012 we certainly do not believe that it is over yet, and the worst may be yet to come. Efforts by governments to solve the underlying problems responsible for the crisis have still not gotten very far, and the 'stress tests' that governments have used to encourage optimism about our financial institutions were of questionable thoroughness.

  Robert J. Shiller

  Stress, Believe, Writing

  Robert J. Shiller (2013). “Finance and the Good Society”, p.14, Princeton University Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness is the perfect companion to Mindfulness in Plain English. Written with the thoroughness and the masterful simplicity so characteristic of his teaching, Bhante Gunaratana presents essential guidelines for turning the Buddha's teachings on the Eightfold Path into living wisdom.

  Larry Rosenberg

  Teaching, Eight, Perfect

  4 Copy quote