95 Quotes Tagged: perfection

The whole concept of 'the perfect meal' is ludicrous.

I knew already that the best meal in the world, the perfect meal, is very rarely the most sophisticated or expensive one....Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one's life.

The fewer there are who follow the way to perfection, the harder that way is to find.

We two make banquets of the plainest fare
In every cup we find the thrill of pleasure...
For us life always moves with lilting measure
We two, we two, we make our world, our pleasure

Perfection in imperfection. Someone whose flaws work well with yours. Infuse modern love with the hues of older romance. An agency that offers something real in a world that was increasingly becoming plastic.

And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cogwheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness; all his dullness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also, and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him.

Seed Leaves

Homage to R. F.

Here something stubborn comes,

Dislodging the earth crumbs

And making crusty rubble.

it comes up bending double,

And looks like a green staple.

It could be seedling maple,

Or artichoke, or bean.

That remains to be seen.

Forced to make choice of ends,

The stalk in time unbends,

Shakes off the seed-case, heaves

Aloft, and spreads two leaves

Which still display no sure

And special signature.

Toothless and fat, they keep

The oval form of sleep.

This plant would like to grow

And yet be embryo;

In crease, and yet escape

The doom of taking shape;

Be vaguely vast, and climb

To the tip end of time

With all of space to fill,

Like boundless Igdrasil

That has the stars for fruit.

But something at the root

More urgent that the urge

Bids two true leaves emerge;

And now the plant, resigned

To being self-defined

Before it can commerce

With the great universe,

Takes aim at all the sky

And starts to ramify.

... for we perceive that this miraculous development is not the result of our own efforts: an eternal Perfection is moulding us into its own image.

A perfect character might be attended with the inconvenience of being envied and hated; and that a benevolent man should allow a few faults in himself, to keep his friends in countenance.

It seems odd that as far as I know nobody has yet been murdered for having too perfect a character! And yet perfection is undoubtedly an irritating thing!

Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.

We like to stress the commonness of heroes. Essences seem undemocratic. We feel oppressed by the call to greatness. We regard an interest in glory or perfection as a sign of mental unhealthiness, and have decided that high achievers, who are called overachievers, owe their surplus ambition to a defect in mothering (either too little or too much). We want to admire but think we have a right not to be intimidated. We dislike feeling inferior to an ideal. So away with ideals, with essences. The only ideals allowed are healthy ones — those everyone may aspire to, or comfortably imagine oneself possessing.

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

How much more reasonable is it to say with the sage Plato, that the perfect happiness of a state consists in the subjects obeying their prince, the prince obeying the laws, and the laws being equitable and always directed to the good of the public?

"Over and over we lose this sense of feeling we are wholly in our skins by means already named as well as through extended duress. Those who toil too long without respite are also at risk. The soulskin vanishes when we are not paying attention to what we are really doing and particularly the cost to us."

"We lose the soulskin by becoming too involved with ego, by being too exacting, perfectionistic, or unnecessarily martyred, or driven by a blind ambition, or by being dissatisfied - about self, family, community, culture, world - and not saying or doing anything about it, or by pretending we are an ending source for others, or by not doing all we can to help ourselves. Oh, there are as many ways to lose the soul skin as there are women in the world."

"The only way to hold on to this sensual soulskin is to retain an exquisitely pristine consciousness about its value and uses."

Don't mistake activity with achievement.