Quotes
Quotes about Perfection
Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection; no more.
No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.
Perfection is attained by slow degrees; it requires the hand of time.
It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.
If a man should happen to reach perfection in this world, he would have to die immediately to enjoy himself.
It's in the reaction of others that perfection is found in the flawed.
Government and state can never be perfect because they owe their raison d'etre to the imperfection of man and can attain their end, the elimination of man's innate impulse to violence, only by recourse to violence, the very thing they are called upon to prevent.
The most basic inherent constraint is that neither time nor wisdom are free goods available in unlimited quantity. This means that in social processes, as in economic processes, it is not only impossible to attain perfection but irrational to seek perfection- or even to seek the "best possible" result in each separate instance.
Nature attains perfection, but man never does. There is a perfect ant, a perfect bee, but man is perpetually unfinished. He is both an unfinished animal and an unfinished man. It is this incurable unfinishedness which sets man apart from other living things. For, in the attempt to finish himself, man becomes a creator. Moreover, the incurable unfinishedness keeps man perpetually immature, perpetually capable of learning and growing.
The awareness of their individual blemishes and shortcomings inclines the frustrated to detect ill will and meanness in their fellow men. Self-contempt, however vague, sharpens our eyes for the imperfections of others. We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves.
The body of all true religion consists, to be sure, in obedience to the will of the Sovereign of the world, in a confidence in His declarations, and in imitation of His perfections.
Perfection of means and confusion of ends seem to characterize our age.
How many things by season season'd are To their right praise and true perfection! -The Merchant of Venice. Act. v. Sc. 1.
When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
Men have ascribed to God imperfections that they would deplore in themselves.
To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues.
The Greek word euphuia, a finely tempered nature, gives exactly the notion of perfection as culture brings us to perceive it; a harmonious perfection, a perfection in which the characters of beauty and intelligence are both present, which unites "the two noblest of things"--as Swift . . . most happily calls them in his Battle of the Books, "the two noblest of things, sweetness and light."
You'd scarce expect one of my age To speak in public on the stage; And if I chance to fall below Demosthenes or Cicero, Don't view me with a critic's eye, But pass my imperfections by. Large streams from little fountains flow, Tall oaks from little acorns grow.
Trifles make perfection--and perfection is no trifle.
