Quotes About Perfectionism

Firstborn girls who grow up under a very perfectionistic, critical father are often hard on themselves and put themselves in situations that aren't healthy as they look for the love, affirmation, and acceptance they didn't get from their own father. When such a firstborn daughter grows up and marries, her husband will pay the price for the sins of her father.

By their very nature, firstborns hate to make mistakes. They are careful and calculating and sticklers for rules and regulations.

I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough.

The idea that one evaluation can measure you forever is what creates the urgency for those with the fixed mindset. That's why they must succeed perfectly and immediately. Who can afford the luxury of trying to grow when everything is on the line right now?

Think about someone you know who is steeped in the fixed mindset. Think about how they're always trying to prove themselves and how they're supersensitive about being wrong or making mistakes. Did you ever wonder why they were this way? (Are you this way?) Now you can begin to understand why.

In the fixed mindset, imperfections are shameful - especially if you're talented - so they lied them away.

There are two choices post forty-five: letting ourselves go or making ourselves sit like good, well-groomed, obliging pets, coats smooth and wrinkle-free, stomachs flat, muscles taut, teeth clean, hair dyed, nails manicured—everything just so. The thing is, though, not only is this completely unnatural, requiring warehouses full of self-control and perseverance, but it demands a level of discomfort you have to be willing to live with 'til death by lap band or liposuction.

If I have any fault, it is digression

Lady Selyse was as tall as her husband, thin of body and thin of face, with prominent ears, a sharp nose, and the faintest hint of a mustache on her upper lip. She plucked it daily and cursed it regularly, yet it never failed to return. Her eyes were pale, her mouth stern, her voice a whip. She cracked it now.

The Platonic idealist is the man by nature so wedded to perfection that he sees in everything not the reality but the faultless ideal which the reality misses and suggests.

Guilt says, "If only you had done it better." Shame says, "If only you had been better.

Harpists spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune.

I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.... I had poems which were rewritten so many times I suspect it was just a way of avoiding sending them out.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.

Perfectionism is slow death.

Photographers, along with dentists, are the two professions never satisfied with what they do. Every dentist would like to be a doctor and inside every photographer is a painter trying to get out.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

He was obsessed with the fear of making a mistake. Sometimes he was convinced it was impossible to do anything else, and that if anyone got anything right it was purely by chance.

The last time it switched the font to Comic Sans, and if that sticks I'm killing myself right here, right now.

Overworked, as usual. It happens to those who are particularly good at their jobs." She handed Eve a cup of tea in one of the pretty china cups.

In the end, we don't believe in launching any type of product if it isn't perfect in our eyes.

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.

My name is on the door, and I care very much about the design that gets put out. I'm sorry, but it has to be my way. You learn that by working for people like I. M. Pei. You think he isn't a design tyrant? Is Calvin Klein a tyrant? When it came to his dresses, he had to be.