Quotes About Perfection

Why are we so afraid of the body? Is it because it's a mess, unpredictable, mortal, unreliable? We take pains to perfect it, to keep it healthy, but we probably wouldn't go to such extremes if we weren't scared to death to lose it. A paradox: we pretend we don't need it, that it's our minds that matter, and yet the body is the thing we can't ignore and that knocks our thinking minds flat to the floor.

I was beautiful, or so my father told me. My oval mirror showed me a face with nothing written on it. I had suitors aplenty but wanted none of them: their doggish devotion seemed too easily won. I had an appetite for magic, even then. I wanted something improbably and perfect as a red rose just opening.

The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself.

Make it your goal never to fail in your desires or experience things you would rather avoid; try never to err in impulse and repulsion; aim to be perfect also in the practice of attention and withholding judgment.

For it is always true that to whatever point the perfecting of anything leads us, progress is an approach towards this point.

Epictetus] believes that God gave man the means to fulfill all his obligations; that these means are within his power, that happiness is attained through what we are capable of, this being the reason God gave them to us. Our mind cannot be forced to believe what is false, nor our will compelled to love something that makes it unhappy. These two powers are therefore free, and it is through them that we can become perfect.

Man was nature's mistake—she neglected to finish him—and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

This is undoubtedly a primitive state of being, and its most perfect examples are found among primitive tribes. Mass movements strive to approximate this primitive perfection, and we are not imagining things when the anti-individualist bias of contemporary mass movements strikes us as a throwback to the primitive.

For all that we know, the wholly harmonious individual might be without the impulse to push on, and without the compulsion to strive for perfection in any department of life. There is always a chance that the perfect society might be a stagnant society.

In essence, healing is this: the release or removal of a block or interference that has kept us separate from the perfection of the universe.

Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.

Ballet trained you to obey orders. Your job was to become your teacher's vision. Nobody wanted a dancer with opinions.

This world demands nothing short of perfection from women who aim high, and our need to see perfection in women has, until recently, far outweighed our need for their participation.

God created the uncertainty for perfection.

The idea that came through in the Renaissance and took hold of the West was that life was no mere anteroom for something greater or divine. Life itself was of value--and could be made perfect.

Julian] was reckoned the reincarnation of Titus the son of Vespasian, in the glorious outcome of his campaigns very like Trajan, as merciful as Antoninus, and in his striving after truth and perfection the equal of Marcus Aurelius, on whom he endeavoured to model his own actions and character.

Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.

OpenTable CEO Christa Quarles tells employees, "early, often, ugly. It's O.K. It doesn't have to be perfect because then I can course-correct much, much faster.

Sex was lovely. Sex was sublime. Sex was flesh and cock and suck and fuck and come. This night sex was starlight. Sex was oxygen. Sex was us, and we were beautiful, beautiful and perfect in each other's arms.

That must be rough, wanting to be the rag doll, wishing you were the ragged thing, when all you did wrong was be too perfect.

Pierce dreamed about a sunny day and Hal, dressed in a white linen shirt and dark cotton trousers, offering him a flower and a kiss, in an almost perfect world.

I said you were a perfect chord. You were so beautiful you made light and sound better. Looking at you, I heard the best music, the kind not even angels can play." Kelly let out what sounded to be a half-broken laugh.

He aims at too great perfection. He wants to know everything and do everything, and life is too short for that. He finishes nothing, because he is ever starting to do something else.

People who have no faults are terrible; there is no way to take advantage of them