psalms on Excellence

No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth.

British author Leonard Ravenhill told the story of a group of tourists visiting a picturesque village where they saw an old man sitting by a fence. In a rather patronizing way, one of the visitors ask...

My friend Eugene has a black belt in martial arts. During a sermon taping, I once held a block of wood as tightly as I could, right in front of my face, while Eugene did a 360-degree spin and splinter...

There is a peculiar gratification in receiving congratulations from one’s squadron for a victory in the air. It is worth more to a pilot than the applause of the whole outside world.

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have these because we have acted rightly; these virtues are formed in man by d...

The wonderful word master used to describe the person who is at the top of his or her craft, whatever the profession. It was a title that one could work toward and with some degree of confidence ascri...

Have you ever heard of a Stradivarius violin? It’s the gold standard of violins—instantly recognizable and famously expensive. These aren’t $29.95 instruments. One sold for $1 million, another for $4 ...

The renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini once led a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in London. His mastery and the orchestra’s precision resulted in thunderous applause from the audience. At ...

One summer, the composer Edvard Grieg stayed at a small Norwegian hotel. A restless child also resided there, constantly annoying the guests by attempting to play the piano, producing nothing but disc...

The early Christian church conquered because the Christians of those days out-thought, out-lived, and out-died the pagans.

The politician Helen Violet Asquith (later Bonham Carter) was once attending a dinner with Winston Churchill, who initially seemed lost in abstraction for an awkwardly long period of time. Abruptly he...