Quotes About Perfection

Stoicism is about developing the tools to deal as effectively as humanly possible with the ensuing conflicts, does not demand perfection, and does not provide specific answers: those are for fools (Epictetus's word) who think the world is black and white, good versus evil, where it is always possible to clearly tell the good guys from the bad guys. That is not the world we live in, and to pretend otherwise is more than a bit dangerous and not at all wise.

Do what you master; master what you do.

Flawed genius is better than flawless talent.

Even if you have three or four extra syllables, or even five or seven, you needn't worry as long as it sounds right. But if even one syllable is stale in your mouth, give it all of your attention.

Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.

But if everyone was made to look perfect, then no one would be special because being special meant being different, by offering something that wasn't on offer elsewhere.

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.

She wouldn't poison herself with the pressures of imagined perfection.

So heaven is life with the good bits taken out, and with an all-white backdrop.

Maybe that's what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfect intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries, but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.

Some paintings were no more than a single perfect brushstroke that conjured a simple yet breathtaking fish or stalk of bamnoo. Clay sculptures in various states of completion lined shelves at the far end of the gallery.

Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money from taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light.

Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection.

The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.

Not a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming is the character of perfection as culture conceives it.

Culture, then, is a study of perfection, and perfection which insists on becoming something rather than in having something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit, not in an outward set of circumstances.

Hebraism and Hellenism,??between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them. The final aim of both Hellenism and Hebraism, as of all great spiritual disciplines, is no doubt the same: man's perfection or salvation.

Therefore, when we speak of ourselves as divided into Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, we must be understood always to imply that within each of these classes there are a certain number of aliens, if we may so call them,??persons who are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection

The perfecting of God's mercies to us must be waited for in a humble observance of his institutions.

teaching us to press towards perfection and endeavour that our last works may be our best works.

The glory of God is the perfection of the creature." There is no better way to honor life and God than to strive to become the - best - version - of - yourself.