97+ Best Continuous Improvement Quotes for a Fulfilling Life

A continual improvement process, also often called a continuous improvement process, is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. Profoundly inspirational continuous improvement quotes will encourage you to think a little deeper than you usually would and broaden your perspective.

If you’re searching for powerful quotes about change and top attitude quotes that perfectly capture what you’d like to say or just want to feel inspired yourself, browse through an amazing collection of top fresh start quotes, greatest improvement quotes and inspiring never look back quotes.

Famous Continuous Improvement Quotes

I do not think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. — Abraham Lincoln

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. — Mark Twain

The world we have created is a product of our thinking; it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. — Albert Einstein

The biggest room in the world is the room for improvement. — Helmut Schmidt

Don’t say it can not be done, rather say, you don’t know how to do it yet. — Tomas Bata

No matter how good you get you can always get better, and that’s the exciting part. — Tiger Woods

Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn. — W. Edwards Deming

I’m always trying to get better. There’s always room for improvement. — Cain Velasquez

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it. — H. James Harrington

continuous improvement quotes

Complacency is the forerunner of mediocrity. You can never work too hard on attitudes, effort and technique. — Don Meyer

We are always pregnant with a truer version of ourselves. — Marianne Williamson

Improvement usually means doing something that we have never done before. — Shigeo Shingo

It’s a great thing about being a musician; you don’t stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it’s a wonderful thing to do. — Marcus Miller

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint Exupery

Persistence, perseverance, and continuous improvement are the ingredients for forming a successful person. — Debasish Mridha

If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and only five minutes finding the solution. — Albert Einstein

Be the change you want to see. — Mahatma Gandhi

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation. — Andrew Grove

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. — Harold Wilson

One key to successful leadership is continuous personal change. Personal change is a reflection of our inner growth and empowerment. — Robert E. Quinn

Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected. — Steve Jobs

The journey is never ending. There’s always gonna be growth, improvement, adversity; you just gotta take it all in and do what’s right, continue to grow, continue to live in the moment. — Antonio Brown

I can do nothing for you but work on myself…you can do nothing for me but work on yourself! — Ram Dass

famous continuous improvement-quotes

Pause and remember – Every single event in your life, especially the difficult lessons, have made you smarter, stronger, and wiser than you were yesterday. Be thankful! — Jennifer Young

A good objective of leadership is to help those who are doing poorly to do well and to help those who are doing well to do even better. — Jim Rohn

Improvement begins with I. — Arnold H. Glasow

Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence – only in constant improvement and constant change. — Tom Peters

Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection. — Kim Collins

If you think of standardization as the best that you know today, but which is to be improved tomorrow; you get somewhere. — Henry Ford

Costs do not exist to be calculated. Costs exist to be reduced. — Taiichi Ohno

The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke

This is bravery: using the challenge of daily life to sharpen our mind and open our heart. — Sakyong Mipham

The more you teach positive ideas to others, the better you learn them yourself. — Brian Tracy

Cultivate Curiosity. If you really want to grow in your lifetime, learn to be as inquisitive as a child. Curious people are never bored, and for them life becomes an unending study of joy. — Tony Robbins

You always want to be better than you are. No matter what, I think that’s important. — Blake Griffin

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often. — Winston Churchill

In terms of changes, the spiritual mentors teach me that I must not forget those relating primarily to improve myself. — Chico Xavier

We know what we are, but know not what we may be. — William Shakespeare

A person and an organization must have goals, take actions to achieve those goals, gather evidence of achievement, study and reflect on the data and from that take actions again. Thus, they are in a continuous feedback spiral toward continuous improvement. This is what ‘Kaizan’ means. — W. Edwards Deming

In order to be happy, human beings must feel they are continuing to grow. Clearly, we must adopt the concept of continuous improvement as a daily principle. — Tony Robbins

Excellence is a continuous process and not an accident. — A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Without change, there is no innovation, creativity or incentive for improvement. — William Pollard

An act of leadership is to say that whatever’s happening now is not good enough and suggest or show that we can do better. If you don’t have that, then you don’t have the catalyst for continuous improvement. — David J. Anderson

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

Almost all quality improvement comes via simplification of design, manufacturing… layout, processes, and procedures. — Tom Peters

If you do not know how to ask the right question, you discover nothing. — W. Edwards Deming

People grow through experience if they meet life honestly and courageously. This is how character is built. — Eleanor Roosevelt

The message of the Kaizen strategy is that not a day should go by without some kind of improvement being made somewhere in the company. — Masaaki Imai

The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize. — Shigeo Shingo

We conquer by continuing. — George Matheson

Manage the cause, not the result. — W.E Deming

You’re always getting a perfect vibrational match to what you predominantly give your attention to. But you’ve got to make the best of it. You’ve got to vibrate slightly different from where you are if you are going to improve where you are. You can’t keep taking score of where your business is or your relationship is or your body is without continuing to create it as it is. To make improvement, you’ve got to reach for a different thought. — Esther Hicks

I think it’s very important to have a feedback loop, where you’re constantly thinking about what you’ve done and how you could be doing it better. — Elon Musk

Once I slow down because I think I have reached my peak, then my skills will go nowhere but down — Bruce Lee

Releasing guilt is like removing a huge weight from your shoulders. Guilt is released through the empowering thought of love and respect for yourself. Let go of standards of perfection and refuse to use up the precious currency of your life, the now, with thoughts that continue to frustrate and weaken you. Instead, vow to be better than you used to be, which is the true test of nobility. — Wayne Dyer

Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all. — Dale Carnegie

Success is a process that continues, not a status that you reach. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned. — Denis Waitley

Inspirational Continuous Improvement Quotes

If we’re really committed to growth, we never stop discovering new dimensions of self and self-expression . — Oprah Winfrey

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged, and increased constantly, or it vanishes. — Peter Drucker

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning. — Benjamin Franklin

You can’t just be you. You have to double yourself. You have to read books on subjects you know nothing about. You have to travel to places you never thought of traveling. You have to meet every kind of person and endlessly stretch what you know. — Mary Wells Lawrence

Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. — Laozi

Perfection is not attainable. But if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence. — Vince Lombardi

I’m never satisfied with what I do. I always think I can do it a lot better. — Michael Jackson

Work hard at your job and you can make a living. Work hard on yourself and you can make a fortune. — Jim Rohn

Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day. — Brian Tracy

Don’t settle for mediocrity; never let good enough be good enough. — Joel Osteen

Without change there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable. — William Pollard

Everything can be improved. — Clarence W. Barron

If you will keep being your best right where you are, you will come into more favor, promotion and opportunity than you ever imagined. — Joel Osteen

What get measured, gets managed. — Peter Drucker

It is impossible to improve any process until it is standardized. If the process is shifting from here to there, then any improvement will just be one more variation that is occasionally used and mostly ignored. One must standardize, and thus stabilize the process, before continuous improvement can be made. — Masaaki Imai

The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they’re mutually reinforcing. — Michael Porter

inspiring continuous improvement quotes

Do what you can on this plane to relieve suffering by constantly working on yourself to be an instrument for the cessation of suffering. To me, that’s what the emerging game is all about. — Ram Dass

Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them. — Henry Ford

An extraordinary life is all about daily, continuous improvements in the areas that matter most. — Robin Sharma

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. — W. Edwards Deming

If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got. — Henry Ford

Small daily improvements over time lead to stunning results. — Robin Sharma

If you define the problem correctly, you almost have the solution. — Steve Jobs

Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives. — William A Foster

Learn continually – There is always one more thing to learn. — Steve Jobs

Some people don’t like change, but you need to embrace change if the alternative is disaster. — Elon Musk

Watch the little things; a small leak will sink a great ship. — Benjamin Franklin

Before you say you can’t do something…TRY IT. — Sakichi Toyoda

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. — Martin Luther King, Jr.

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time. — Sam Walton

If a company isn’t continuously improving then it is slowly dying. — Dave Waters

All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment a customer gives us an order to the point we collect the cash. And we are reducing that timeline in the value stream by removing non value-added wastes. — Taiichi Ohno

A relentless barrage of “why’s” is the best way to prepare your mind to pierce the clouded veil of thinking caused by the status quo. Use it often. — Shigeo Shingo

The distance between number one and number two is always a constant. If you want to improve the organization, you have to improve yourself and the organization gets pulled up with you. — Indra Nooyi

Something is wrong if workers do not look around each day, find things that are tedious or boring, and then rewrite the procedures. Even last month’s manual should be out of date. — Taiichi Ohno

My good friend, you are a citizen of Athens, a city which is very great and very famous for its wisdom and power – are you not ashamed of caring so much for the making of money and for fame and prestige, when you neither think nor care about wisdom and truth and the improvement of your soul? — Plato

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but habit. — Aristotle

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all. — Peter F. Drucker

The common question that gets asked in business is, ‘why?’ That’s a good question, but an equally valid question is, ‘why not?’ — Jeff Bezos

Continuous improvement is not about the things you do well — that’s work. Continuous improvement is about removing the things that get in the way of your work. The headaches, the things that slow you down, that’s what continuous improvement is all about. — Bruce Hamilton

About the Author

Deniz Yalım is the founder and visionary behind BayArt, a platform renowned for its deeply resonant and inspirational content focusing on love, relationship, happiness, success and motivation. With a background rich in literature, psychology, and communication, Deniz has dedicated their career to the art of using words to inspire and empower. Passionate about the transformative power of language, Deniz has skillfully curated BayArt to be a platform for those seeking wisdom and guidance in the realms of love and life. Their writings not only reflect a deep understanding of human emotions and relationships but also aim to ignite change and encourage positive thinking. Through BayArt, Deniz Yalım continues to touch lives, offering solace, motivation, and a sense of connectedness to a global community.