Quotes About Perfectionism

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

We keep silent about what we know, and make good progress, so Roithamer.

It is not just Gould's playing but the fact that he stopped playing, turned his back on the world, that fascinated Bernhard. It

Perfectionism, of course, was something which even as a young man he had come to see as the innermost essence of talent.

True pornography is given us by vastly patient professionals.

Oh, mother, really you need not dust them. It would take years to dust all those little holes." And she frowned at the top of her mother's head and bit her lip with impatience. Mother's deliberate way of doing things was simply maddening. It was old age, she supposed, loftily.

Living with people at close range over many years, as both monastics and small-town people do, is much more difficult than wearing a hair shirt. More difficult, too, I would add, than holding to the pleasant but unrealistic ideal of human perfectibility that seems to permeate much New Age thinking.

Biology, like any high-stakes academic field, is demanding. Because of this it has a reputation for turning young professors into curmudgeons who adopt a masochistic brand of workaholism, in which relaxation becomes a sign of failure and the accomplishments of peers become tragedies.

The idea that you can ever reach a point where all your obligations are handled is a fantasy.

Sometimes, indeed, there is such a discrepancy between the genius and his human qualities that one has to ask oneself whether a little less talent might not have been better.

He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.

The United States is a successful nation that is constantly susceptible to melancholy because things are not perfect.

Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know.

Ah suppose man, ah'm too much ay a perfectionist, ken? It's likesay, if things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered, y'know? Ah git good vibes aboot this interview the day though man, ken?

That, by the way, was Kafka's problem when it came to writing: he saw all the defects—his own and everyone else's.

She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer.

I would have thought that I would have become one of those parents - just because it's my nature to be such a perfectionist - that anything falling short, I would have seen as a failure. But something has happened to me over the past few years - it's not Zen, believe me, I'm not at all Zen - but I'm so appreciative of even the chaos.

I am notoriously hard on myself in terms of working on new material and while I am critical of my performance on the Led Zeppelin material, I am way more critical of my own stuff. I'm pretty hard on myself.

I was the girl who was correcting people on the spelling of Led Zeppelin.

There is no such thing as a pretty good omelette.

There is only one real sin and that is to persuade oneself that the second best is anything but second best.

In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.