God is in the details.

The grand impression of any work, whether a building, a meal or a letter, is made of small decisions, and the quality of the whole is decided there. A well-conceived design can be ruined by a clumsy joint, while a modest one can feel almost sacred because every junction and edge has been thought through. The word "God" suggests that care at this scale is a kind of reverence, and that what looks like fussiness is really respect for the work and for the people who will use it.

The line is most often attributed to Mies van der Rohe, though the attribution is disputed, and similar sayings are credited to others, including Flaubert. It fits Mies's modernism well. His architecture, with its famously spare look, left nowhere to hide: with so little ornament, precision of proportion and construction carried everything.

Today, someone could apply it by taking one ordinary task and finishing it properly. Before sending a job application, you might reread it for a wrong company name, uneven formatting or a vague sentence. Nobody will praise those fixes, but they are often what makes the whole thing feel trustworthy.