Quotes About Perfection

Perfection is impossible without humility. Why should I strive for perfection, if I am already good enough?

The impulse to perfection cannot exist where the definition of perfection is the arbitrary decision of authority. That which is born in loneliness and from the heart cannot be defended against the judgment of a committee of sycophants. The volatile essences which make literature cannot survive the clichés of a long series of story conferences.

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

The condition of perfection is idleness: the aim of perfection is youth.

Details make perfection, and perfection is not a detail.

Music is harmony, harmony is perfection, perfection is our dream, and our dream is heaven.

Don't think you are unstoppable or foolproof. Don't think that the only way your business will work is through perfection. Don't aim for perfection. Aim for success.

We have not reached ethical perfection in hunting. One never achieves perfection in anything, and perhaps it exists precisely so that one can never achieve it. Its purpose is to orient our conduct and to allow us to measure the progress accomplished. In this sense, the advancement achieved in the ethics of hunting is undeniable.

There is no better news than that the God who makes the demand for perfection also meets the demand for perfection on our behalf.

What is perfect? From the Zen mind, perfection is not being there.

The attractive idea that we can now have a parliament of man with authority to control the conduct of nations by legislation or an international police force with power to enforce national conformity to rules of right conduct is a counsel of perfection.

Love is the creative refinement of sex energy. And so, when love reaches perfection, the absence of sex automatically follows. A life of love, an abstinence from physical pleasures is called brahmacharya, and anyone who wishes to be free from sex must develop his capacity to love. Freedom from sex cannot be achieved through supersession. Liberation from sex is only possible through love.

I'm gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts . . . I [like to] create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed homely process along the way.

The real questions for parents should be: "Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?" If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn't exist, and I've found what makes children happy doesn't always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.

The Sacrament [of the Holy Eucharist] is the Gift of gifts, and the Grace of graces. When the almighty and eternal God comes to us with all the perfection of His thrice holy humanity and His divinity, He surely does not come empty-handed.

In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty -he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world -alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

The biggest thing for women to keep in mind is you can't ever let someone define beauty for you. Look in the mirror and say that this is my definition of perfection.

Lawyers, Preachers, and Tomtits Eggs, there are more of them hatch'd than come to perfection.

There's some muscle group around your shoulders that seizes up during the perfection dance and doesn't let go until you are asleep, or alone. Or maybe it never really lets go at all.

It would be difficult to say which had seen highest perfection in the other, or which had been the happiest: she, in receiving his declarations and proposals, or he in having them accepted.

Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves.

Software breaks before it bends, so it demands perfection in a universe that prefers statistics.

Perfection is not just about control, it is also about letting go.

The true purpose of life is the perfection of humanity through individual effort, under the guidance of God's inspiration. Real life is response to the best within us. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, is to deprive one's self of the real joy of living.

Perfection is always found in maturity, whether it be in the animal or in the intellectual world. Reflection is the mother of wisdom, and wisdom the parent of success.

As long as algebra and geometry have been separated, their progress have been slow and their uses limited; but when these two sciences have been united, they have lent each mutual forces, and have marched together towards perfection.

Self reliance, the height and perfection of man, is reliance on God.

The basis of artistic creation is not what is, but what might be; not the real, but the possible. Artists create according to the same principles as nature, but they apply them to individual entities, while nature, to use a Goethean expression, thinks nothing of individual things. She is always building and destroying, because she wants to achieve perfection, not in the individual thing, but in the whole.

Perfection, in anything, is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.

I don't even bother trying to picture a perfect world, because I don't think that perfection is something to strive for. I prefer imperfection. That's what makes things special. You know, things that change

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

The perfection preached in the gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

Actually, the true gourmet, like the true artist, is one of the unhappiest creatures existent. His trouble comes from so seldom finding what he constantly seeks: perfection.

Perfection is impossible. Trying to do your best is important, but loving yourself and loving others should come first.

It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God˜an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than _de trop_: it is an impediment to perfection.

Would you be in any way offended if I said that you seem to me to be in every way the visible personification of absolute perfection?

We've got to be long distance runners on the spiritual path. We want to run as fast as we can, but at the same time realize that if God isn't at the end of that 100 yards, we don't fall flat of exhaustion. We've got to have whatever rhythm it takes to be able to go on for incarnations until we find that state of perfection we've been seeking.

Refusing to be disillusioned is the cause of much of the suffering of human life. And this is how that suffering happens-if we love someone, but do not love God, we demand total perfection and righteousness from that person, and when we do not get it, we become cruel and vindictive; yet we are demanding of a human being which he or she cannot possibly give.

How could he find perfection in such an average day? Then I realized this was the whole point.

Infinite perfection is in every man, though unmanifested.

[The works of Archimedes] are without exception, monuments of mathematical exposition; the gradual revelation of the plan of attack, the masterly ordering of the propositions, the stern elimination of everything not immediately relevant to the purpose, the finish of the whole, are so impressive in their perfection as to create a feeling akin to awe in the mind of the reader.

The illusion of perfection is an illusion anyway.

His beauty did not blaze like Will's did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow falling against a silver gray sky.

Perfection does not exist. It's more important to be happy with the human being you are.

The world is not imperfect or slowly evolving along a long path to perfection. No, it is perfect at every moment; every sin already carries grace within it, all small children are potential old men, all sucklings have death within them, all dying people — eternal life.

Truth is the foundation and the reason of the perfection of beauty, for of whatever stature a thing may be, it cannot be beautiful-and perfect, unless it be truly what it should be, and possess truly all that it should have.

Perfection is the willingness to be imperfect.

The leaves did not stir on the trees, grasshoppers chirruped, and the monotonous hollow sound of the sea rising up from below, spoke of the peace, of the eternal sleep awaiting us. So it must have sounded when there was no Yalta, no Oreanda here; so it sounds now, and it will sound as indifferently and monotonously when we are all no more. And in this constancy, in this complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there lies hid, perhaps, a pledge of our eternal salvation, of the unceasing movement of life upon earth, of unceasing progress towards perfection.