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Quotes of the day: Perfection
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Published Saturday, March 01, 2014 @ 12:00 AM EST
Mar 01 2014

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A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.
-Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

A sublime religion inevitably generates a strong feeling of guilt. There is an unavoidable contrast between loftiness of profession and imperfection of practice. And, as one would expect, the feeling of guilt promotes hate and brazenness. Thus it seems that the more sublime the faith the more virulent the hatred it breeds.
-Eric Hoffer

A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architectural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
-Reinhold Neibuhr

Aim for success, not perfection.
-Dr. David M. Burns

American women expect to find in their husbands a perfection that English women only hope to find in their butlers.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.
-Emile Zola

Don't expect perfect products unless you are willing to pay for perfection.
-Robert Siegmeister

Finality is death. Perfection is finality. Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.
-James Stephens

Have no fear of perfection- you'll never reach it.
-Salvador Dali

History balances the frustration of 'how far we have to go' with the satisfaction of 'how far we have come.' It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.
-Lewis F. Powell, Jr.

I cling to my imperfection, as the very essence of my being.
-Anatole France

I remember what it is like to be in love before any of love's complexities or realities or disturbances has entered in, to dilute its splendor and challenge its perfection.
-E.B. White

If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.
-Leo Tolstoy

Imperfections create character.
-Ellen Hopkins

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

It is not given to us to right every wrong, to make perfect all the imperfections of the world. But neither is it given to us to sit content in our storehouses- dieting while others starve, buying eight million new cars a year while most of the world goes without shoes. We are simply not doing enough.
-Robert F. Kennedy

No man is entirely free from weakness and imperfection in this life. Men of the most exalted genius and active minds are generally most perfect slaves to the love of fame. They sometimes descend to as mean tricks and artifices in pursuit of honor or reputation as the miser descends to in pursuit of gold.
-John Adams

Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.
-Edith Schaeffer

Perfection does not exist. To understand this is the triumph of human intelligence; to expect to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.
-Alfred de Musset

Perfection is a trifle dull. It is not the least of life's ironies that this, which we all aim at, is better not quite achieved.
-W. Somerset Maugham

Perfection is a waste of time.
-Kim De Coite

Perfection is finally attained, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem- in my opinion- to characterize our age.
-Albert Einstein

So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we have nothing else but words to do it with.
-John Locke

The division of labor, which has brought such perfection in mechanical industries, is altogether fatal when applied to productions of the mind. All work of the mind is superior in proportion as the mind that produces it is universal.
-Napoleon Bonaparte

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
-George Orwell

The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty.
-Brooks Atkinson

The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
-Logan Pearsall Smith

The maxim 'Nothing but perfection' may be spelled 'Paralysis.'
-Winston Churchill

The pursuit of perfection often impedes improvement.
-George F. Will

There are two things which make it impossible to believe that this world is the successful work of an all-wise, all-good, and, at the same time, all-powerful Being; firstly, the misery which abounds in it everywhere; and secondly, the obvious imperfection of its highest product, man, who is a burlesque of what he should be.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
-H.G. Wells

To obey orders is all perfection.
-Horatio Nelson

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.
-Michelangelo

We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals.
-Martha Washington

We think of ourselves as failures, rather than renounce our belief in the possibility of perfection.
-Stephen Vizinczey


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