Quotes about Perfection

Kings ought to differ from their subjects, not in kind, but in perfection.

Nature makes nothing incomplete, and nothing in vain.

Reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.

He who does not advance in perfection falls into imperfection. An unattended garden becomes full of weeds. Things do not remain the same by being left alone. White fences do not stay white; they gradually become gray and then black. There are no planes in the spiritual life. We go uphill or we go downhill. The moment we cease to row against the stream, the current carries us down river.

When Whistler was complimented on the portrait of his mother, he said, "You know how it is; one tries to make one's Mummy just as nice as he can." When God became Man, He too, I believe, would make His Mother as nice as He could—and that would make her a perfect Mother.

For love concentrates on the object, sex concentrates on the subject. Love is directed to someone else for the sake of the other's perfection; sex is directed to self for the sake of self-satisfaction.

No one is good but God alone. What is good is therefore divine, what is divine is therefore good.

the argument for the perfectibility of humankind rests on a logical fallacy. Thus: man is by definition imperfect, say those who would perfect him. But those who would perfect him are themselves, by their own definition, imperfect.

Too good to be true, I will think. Too good for this earth. Good, be thou my evil.

Doing a job RIGHT the first time gets the job done. Doing the job WRONG fourteen times gives you job security.

I have in my mind's eye an image of what a perfect mother and wife should be; and in her whom I must call "Mother" I find no trace of that image.

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.