Quotes About Perfection

No matter how good somebody's life looks from the outside, you can be sure there's something about it you wouldn't want to have in your life.

His people believed that the Mother had first created a spirit world, and the spirits of all things in it were perfect. The spirits then produced living copies of themselves, to populate the ordinary world. The spirit was the model, the pattern from which all things were derived, but no copy could be as perfect as the original; not even the spirits themselves could make perfect copies, that was why each was different.

I skim through the issue [of Elle] and reach the offending photo, a montage that ridicules rather than glorifies our idol. It is one of the mysteries of our trade. You work for weeks on a subject, it goes back and forth among the most skillful pairs of hands, and no one spots the glaring blunder that a neophyte would spot in a second.

you believe that if every person had enough money, enough work, enough leisure, enough learning, that if they were not oppressed by those above them, or fearful of those below them, humankind would be perfected? Byron asked this in his negative drawl

Si hubiera un pueblo de dioses, se gobernaría democráticamente. Un gobierno tan perfecto no conviene a los hombres.

No one had a perfect life, that even the people who seemed to have it all had their secrets.

I felt that the success of the enterprise was in my hands: the moment had an obscure meaning which had to be trimmed and perfected; certain motions had to be made, certain words spoken: I staggered under the weight of my responsibility.

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions.

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it.

Not that you need to be a saint to have visions worth talking about. The most effective prescription, I suspect, is to be a disciplined sinner. Perfection, as Valery noted, is work.

Do good work. Don't worry about expressing yourself. Figure out what you do well and make it better.

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

Often, the things that a lot of work has gone into have been incredibly bad because they're over-worked.

Elaboration is not beauty, and sand-paper never finished a piece of bad work.

The work of a master reeks not of the sweat of the brow - suggests no effort - and is finished from its beginning.

Usually I work with a digital camera and compose my works digitally or give them a finish on the computer, in order to make them meet my ideas perfectly.

it is axiomatic with most writing people that there are no such things as perfect conditions for work.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

Never show unfinished work.

Life is a way of perfection. You need to work on yourself. You become a good person. If you do your work you will discover sublime feelings.

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

It grieves us to produce work that is not perfect.