Perfecting Quotes & Sayings

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle's eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

For a writer, a break from working is nonexistent; while you fingers may stop typing, your brain never stops writing, developing, changing, and perfecting the story. — Nicole Gulla

Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind. — Criss Jami

The advance and perfecting of mathematics are closely joined to the prosperity of the nation. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Among Evangelical Christians, all of whom await the Second Coming of Jesus, there are historically two camps: postmillennialists and premillennialists. For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most were of the "post" variety, meaning that they expected the Messiah's return after the thousand-year reign of peace. In order to hasten His arrival, they set out to create that harmonious world here and now, fighting for the abolition of slavery, prohibition of alcohol, public education, and women's literacy.
The chaos of the Civil War and industrialization caused many evangelicals to rethink their optimism. They determined that Jesus would actually arrive before the final judgment. Therefore any efforts toward a just society here on earth were futile; what mattered was perfecting one's faith. As historian Randall Balmer writes, these believers "retreated into a theology of despair, one that essentially ceded the temporal world to Satan and his minions. — Mark Sundeen

A sinner is justified and reconciled with God the moment he truly believes in the person and atoning work of Christ. However, the evidence that he truly believed and was genuinely converted in that moment is that he goes on believing and confessing all the days of his life. This is not to say that the true believer will be immune to doubts, free from failure, or unhindered in his growth to maturity. However, it does mean that the God who began a good work in him will continue perfecting that work until the final day.7 Salvation is by grace alone through faith alone.8 However, the evidence of saving faith is a genuine and enduring confession of the lordship of Jesus Christ throughout the believer's life. — Paul David Washer

The whole of history since the ascension of Jesus into heaven is concerned with one work only: the building and perfecting of this City of God. — Augustine Of Hippo

When our focus is on seeking, perfecting, or clinging to romance, the charge is often generated by instability, rather than by an authentic connection with another person. — Sharon Salzberg

The essence of acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium. — Minnie Maddern Fiske

Now he knew ... that there was nothing so vital as paying attention, and perfecting the humble offices of love. — Susan Vreeland

We ought as much as we can to endeavour the Perfecting of our Beings, and that we be as happy as possibly we may. — Mary Astell

Don't focus all your time and effort on creating the templates & perfecting the documents. Answering key product questions is more critical. — Brian Lawley

The poem is a form of texting ... it's the original text. It's a perfecting of a feeling in language - it's a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. — Carol Ann Duffy

The perfecting of one's self is the fundamental base of all progress and all moral development. — Confucius

Not perfection as a final goal, but the ever-enduring process of perfecting, maturing, refining is the aim of living. — John Dewey

For the first time, I notice the lax skin at Mrs. Nightwing's jaw, the fine down that lies upon her cheek like the imprint of a childe's hand, and I wonder what it must be like watching yourself soften under the years, unable to stop it. what it's like measuring your days in perfecting girls' curtsies and drinking nightly glasses of sherry, trying to keep up with the world as it pulls you spinning into the furure, knowing you are always one step behind it. — Libba Bray

Great sculptors and artists spend countless hours perfecting their talents. They don't pick up a chisel or a brush and palette, expecting immediate perfection. They understand that they will make many errors as they learn, but they start with the basics, the key fundamentals first. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. — Christopher McDougall

An excellence mind pursues perfecting, not perfection. — Pearl Zhu

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates
the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes
have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria ... After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. — Janine Benyus

I do not believe that we can stop perfecting new ways of dying until we have found new ways of living. Every new life-way ought to prevent a new death-way. — Haniel Long

Only a very gifted mind could cope singly with all the problems which present themselves in the perfecting of a home. — Arnold Bennett

The challenge, it turns out, isn't in perfecting your ability to know when to start and when to stand by. The challenge is getting into the habit of — Seth Godin

Manufacturing is more than just putting parts together. It's coming up with ideas, testing principles and perfecting the engineering, as well as final assembly. — James Dyson

Life in the Church means experiencing leaders who are not always wise, mature, and deft. In fact, some of us are as bumpy and uneven as a sackful of old doorknobs. Some of the polishing we experience is a result of grinding against each other. How vital submissiveness is in such circumstances, especially if the lubrication of love is not amply present.
In a church established, among other reasons, for the perfecting of the Saints
an ongoing process
it is naive to expect, and certainly unfair to demand, perfection in our peers. A brief self-inventory is wise before we "cast the first stone." Possessing a few rocks in our own heads, it is especially dangerous to have rocks too ready in our hands. — Neil A. Maxwell

By perfecting the practices of zazen and mindfulness, by learning patience and love and by realizing the essential emptiness of all phenomena, you will discover nirvana. — Frederick Lenz

To receive applause for works which do not demand all our powers hinders our advance towards a perfecting of our spirit. It usually means that thereafter we stand still. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

Sometimes perfecting the one thing can be the enemy of getting any traction on anything else. — Jay Roach

If you really want to find out something about immortality, you have to live in the mountain forests for 30 years. If you succeed in perfecting your eyes and ears there, if you harmonize the heart and the will so that your mind becomes clear and pure and free of all that is evil, you will be able to discuss the matter. — Wang Yangming

Enlightenment is the culmination of self-knowledge, pure unadulterated knowledge. Not knowledge you can get from reading a book, it comes from perfecting your awareness, your mind. — Frederick Lenz

Neuroplasticity research showed that the brain changes its very structure with each different activity it performs, perfecting its circuits so it is better suited to the task at hand. — Naveen Jain

It is a dangerous thing for the perfecting of our minds to gain applause by works that do not call forth the whole of our energies; for in that case one generally comes to a standstill. — Georg C. Lichtenberg

You might think that after 40 years of practice you wouldn't need to practice anymore, but sadly it doesn't work that way. You still have to keep chugging away and perfecting. — Joshua Bell

Because as a musician to say that I play music to be creative is a lie, I could do that at home by myself. I mean it's true, but it's not the entire truth. There's something about people driven to do something public on a large scale in front of the masses and perfecting and portraying a personality that is true but it's amplified. — Kennedy

People confuse science and scientists. Science is great, but individual scientists are dangerous. They are human; they are marred by the biases humans have. Perhaps even more. For most scientists are hard-headed, otherwise they would not derive the patience and energy to perform the Herculean tasks asked of them, like spending eighteen hours a day perfecting their doctoral thesis. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

God's not in the business of pampering His children. He's in the business of perfecting them. — Katie Ganshert

Ah, but it wasn't just her lovely face that haunted him. Nor the soft, lush body he was increasingly desperate to see liberated from that woolen cocoon. It was the way she'd so willingly owned up to the truth. The way her spirit had sparked when he'd told her to put aside her art. The way she'd practically made sweet, innocent love to him with her eyes when he'd said he cared if she lived or died.
Good Lord. The laughable irony of it. He'd wasted weeks of his adolescence memorizing sonnets, spent years perfecting little murmured innuendos. Only to learn the most seductive phrase in the English language was something akin to: All things being equal, I'd rather not see you mauled by a shark. — Tessa Dare

Pianists of extraordinary talent, such as Christina Petrowska,spend a large part of their early lives perfecting technique ... Miss Petrowska,a Canadian with a phenomenal ability to play the most difficult music cleanly, gave a demonstration of her achievements at Carnegie Recital Hall. A product of the Juilliard School who studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gyorgy Ligeti in Europe, Miss Petrowska built most of her program around fiercely difficult contemporary works. She has fingers that work like chrome-plated pistons, and her high-seated position let her bring pulverizing power to bear. — Donal Henahan

Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvement — Stephen Jay Gould

Are using the word practice here in a special way. It does not mean a rehearsal or a perfecting of some skill so that we can put it to use at some other time. In the meditative context, practice means "being in the present on purpose." The means and the end of meditation are really the same. We are not trying to get somewhere else, only working — Jon Kabat-Zinn

There are some who say that Time is itself a hammer; that each slow second marks another tap that makes big rocks into little rocks, waterfalls into canyons, cliffs into beaches.
There are some who say that Time is instead a blade. They see the dance of its razored tip, poised like a venomous snake, forever ready to slay faster than the eye can see.
And there are some who say that Time is both hammer and blade.
They say the hammer is a sculptor's mallet, and the blade is a sculptor's chisel: that each stroke is a refinement, a perfecting, a discovery of truth and beauty within what would otherwise be blank and lifeless stone.
And I name this saying wisdom. — Matthew Woodring Stover

It was also important for me to have a burning desire to achieve something worthwhile on that instrument, and I devoted many many many hours with little or no compensation to perfecting whatever I could, because I loved it so much. — Billy Sheehan

Life is not about having perfect days. Life is not about handling days perfectly. Life is about perfecting one's character through the having and handling of every given day. — Richelle E. Goodrich

For Kierkegaard, for Heidegger, for Sartre, the more profound the awareness, the more authentic the existence. They measure honesty and the essence of experience by the degree of awareness. But is our humanity really built on awareness? Doesn't awareness
that forced, extreme awareness
arise among us, not from us, as something created by effort, the mutual perfecting of ourselves in it, the confirming of something that one philosopher forces onto another? Isn't man, therefore, in his private reality, something childish and always beneath his own awareness? And doesn't he feel awareness to be, at the same time, something alien, imposed and unimportant? If this is how it is, this furtive childhood, this concealed degradation are ready to explode your systems sooner or later. — Witold Gombrowicz

A cook never knows if the dish he perfected for hours was described properly or if a guest even liked his food. It's hard to spend hours perfecting a dish only to relinquish control. But chefs need to put aside their egos and trust the people serving the food. — Daniel Humm

Not a perfect soul, I am perfecting. Not a human being, I am a human becoming. — Normandi Ellis

Needed mothering. Grief and distance bound the wound, perfecting the bond — M.L. Stedman

What then are we to do about our problems? We must learn to live with them until such time as God delivers us from them ... we must pray for grace to endure them without murmuring. Problems patiently endured will work for our spiritual perfecting. They harm us only when we resist them or endure them unwillingly. — Aiden Wilson Tozer

A DESCRIPTION OF HAPPINESS IN KOBENHAVN
All this windless day snow fell
into the King's Garden
where I walked, perfecting and growing old,
abandoning one by one everybody:
randomly in love with the paradise
furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,
dreaming of a marble sun
and its strictness. This
is to tell you I am not coming back.
To tell you instead of my private life
among people who must wrestle their hearts
in order to feel anything, as though it were
unnatural. What I master by day
still lapses in the night. But I go on
with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow
come down, learning to flower by tightening. — Jack Gilbert

We deem it opportune to remind our children of their duty to take an active part in public life and to contribute toward the attainment of the common good of the entire human family as well as to that of their own political community. They should endeavor, therefore, in the light of their Christian faith and led by love, to insure that the various institutions - whether economic, social, cultural or political in purpose - should be such as not to create obstacles, but rather to facilitate or render less arduous man's perfecting of himself in both the natural order and the supernatural.... Every believer in this world of ours must be a spark of light, a center of love, a vivifying leaven amidst his fellow men. And he will be this all the more perfectly, the more closely he lives in communion with God in the intimacy of his own soul — Pope John XXIII

Reality is very, very contradictory, and so I try to write just perfecting what I see, what I read, what I feel, in a feel-thinking way. Not only giving ideas, or receiving ideas, or trying to explain something, but mainly feel-thinking, a feel-thinking language able to tie the heart and the mind, which have been divorced. — Eduardo Galeano

Let us pray: Most gracious and heavenly Father, we thank You, Lord God, for Your goodness. We celebrate life today, right where we are. Father, we acknowledge that nothing compares to You. There is nobody greater than You, O God. You and You alone are worthy of our praise. Thank You for this time of testing. Thank You for perfecting that which concerns us. Thank You for promising to complete that which You have started. Thank You for allowing us to trade in our spirits of heaviness for garments of praise. Hallelujah! We have prayed. Amen. — Kellie Lane

...forgetting and perfecting freely, with open hand giving back to the world the gifts received, thus it is that the Ego stands in the current of life's events. Because a man bears this and no other Ego he has particular experiences, out of which certain deeds--and misdeeds--issue. — Hermann Poppelbaum

She spent hours drawing on her own, trying to perfect her craft. And when she got into music, she had that same diligence in developing her own style as well as perfecting the craft of singing. I don't think that is part of the normal assumption of who sh — Laura Joplin

The safest principle through life, instead of reforming others, is to set about perfecting yourself. — Benjamin Haydon

Let us purify ourselves from everything that contaminates body and spirit, perfecting holiness out of reverence for God. — Lysa TerKeurst

The Hawk hired fifty harpers and jesters and taught them new songs. Songs about the puny fairy fool who had been chased away from Dalkeith-Upon-the-Sea by the legendary
Hawk. And being such a legend in his own time, his tales were ceded great truth and staying power. The players
were delighted with the epic grandeur of such a wild tale. When they had rehearsed to perfection the ditties and
refrains portraying the defeat of the fool, the Hawk sent them into the counties of Scotland and England. Grimm
accompanied the group of players traveling to Edinburgh to help spread the tale himself, while Hawk spent late hours by the candle scribbling, crossing out and perfecting his command for when the fool came. Sometimes, in the wee hours of the morning, he would reach for his set of sharp awls and blades and begin carving toy soldiers and dolls, one by one. — Karen Marie Moning

The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting. — John Cage

The reasons are likely rooted in religion. Playing around with God's creation is simply not allowed. Incidentally, in the past it was precisely the deeply religious people who said: Of course we're playing with God's creation, in fact we're perfecting it. This sort of thinking is frowned upon today. — Hans Von Storch

Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you'll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive. There's no AutoCorrect in life - think before texting the universe. Breaking the rules just for fun is too easy - the real challenge lies in perfecting the art of knowing which rules to accept and which to rewrite. The more you experiment, take risks, and make mistakes, the better you'll know yourself, the better you'll know the world, and the more focused you'll be. — Sophia Amoruso

The whole gestural system of work was also obscene, in sharp contrast to the miniaturized and abstract gestural system of control to which it has now been reduced. The world of the objects of old seems like a theatre of cruelty and instinctual drives in comparison with the formal neutrality and prophylactic 'whiteness' of our perfect functional objects. Thus the handle of the flatiron gradually diminishes as it undergoes 'contouring' - the term is typical in its superficiality and abstractness; increasingly it suggests the very absence of gesture, and carried to its logical extreme this handle will no longer be manual - merely manipulable. At that point, the perfecting of the form will have relegated man to a pure contemplation of his power. — Jean Baudrillard

Perfecting the past blurs your focus of the future. — Marvin Davis

Whatever your passion is, keep doing it. Don't waste time chasing after success or comparing yourself to others. Every flower blooms at a different pace. Excel at doing what your passion is and only focus on perfecting it. Eventually people will see what you are great at doing, and if you are truly great, success will come chasing after you. — Suzy Kassem

What is the mark of a Christian? That he be purified of all defilement of the flesh and of the spirit in the Blood of Christ, perfecting sanctification in the fear of God and the love of Christ, and that he have no blemish nor spot nor any such thing; that he be holy and blameless and so eat the Body of Christ and drink His Blood; for 'he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh judgement to himself.' What is the mark of those who eat the Bread and drink the Cup of Christ? That they keep in perpetual remembrance Him who died for us and rose again. — Saint Basil

The only way to maximize group creativity - to make the whole more than the sum of its parts - is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost. When you believe your flaws will be quickly corrected by the group, you're less worried about perfecting your contribution, which leads to a more candid conversation. We can only get it right when we talk about what we got wrong. — Jonah Lehrer

Perfecting your character isn't a marathon, a race, or a competition. It can only be won in stride with daily motivation. — Orly Wahba

The brain is its own galaxy, with more cells than stars in the Milky Way. The most powerful organ in the body, it rivals any supercomputer, processing 90,000 to 150,000 thoughts a day through billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections. Now that we have found a pathway to retrieving memories that before were inaccessible, we are perfecting its function too quickly. — Gwendolyn Womack

Moral improvement (or perfecting) require an evolution leading to a higher consciousness, which is the true torch of life; it is what we have failed too much to appreciate, and that which would be fatal to fail to appreciate any longer ("pluslongtemps", Fr.); For if we do not take it upon ourselves to remedy in time to the moral colapse (or bankruptcy) that already threaten, the whole civilisation will risks to disappear. — African Spir

Sport, properly directed, develops character, makes a person courageous, a generous loser, and a gracious victor; it refines the senses, gives intellectual penetration, and steels the will to endurance. It is not merely a physical development then. Sport, rightly understood, is an occupation of the whole person, and while perfecting the body as an instrument of the mind, it also makes the mind itself a more refined instrument for the search and communication of truth ... . — Pope Pius XII

Norman Mailer records in his recent essays and public appearances his perfecting of himself as a virile instrument of letters; he is perpetually in training, getting ready to launch himself from his own missile pad into a high, beautiful orbit; even his failures may yet be turned to successes. — Susan Sontag

Yes, brothers and sisters, the mission of the Church is glorious-to invite all of us to come unto Christ through proclaiming the gospel, perfecting our lives, and redeeming our dead. As we come unto Christ, we bless our own lives, those of our families, and our Father in Heaven's children, both living and dead ...
"I pray that we will be obedient to God, learn His will and do it, and, above all, that we will keep the first and great commandment-to love the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength" ("Come Unto Christ," April 1988 General Conference). — Ezra Taft Benson

Suffering often changes our ambitions. Before his conversion, Saul cared primarily about his reputation and perfecting his religiosity. The transformed Paul left reputation behind and instead boasted in weakness, longing to suffer and share in Christ's death — Anonymous

God begins the process of perfecting us from the moment we are converted from unbelief to faith in Christ. The Holy Spirit regenerates us. He give us a new heart with a new set of holy desires (Ezek. 36:26). He transforms our stubborn wills. He opens our hearts to embrace the truth rather than reject it. He enables us to believe rather than doubt. He gives us a hunger for righteousness an a desire for Him. And thus the new birth transforms the inner person. From that point on, everything that occurs in our lives - good or bad - God uses to move us toward being like Christ (Rom. 8:28-30). — John MacArthur Jr.

Perfecting is a journey ... There is no destination called perfection. — Ashok Kallarakkal

Art, science, love, inspiration, ideals - choose out all the words with which humanity is wont, or has been in the past, to be consoled or to be amused - Chekhov has only to touch them and they instantly wither and die. And Chekhov himself faded, withered and died before our eyes. Only his wonderful art did not die - his art to kill by a mere touch, a breath, a glance, everything whereby men live and wherein they take their pride. And in this art he was constantly perfecting himself, and he attained to a virtuosity beyond the reach of any of his rivals in European literature. — Lev Shestov

God's love is not a pampering love. God's love is a perfecting love. God does not get up every day trying to figure how He can plant a bigger smile on your face. God is in the process of growing us and changing us. His love is a transforming love. — James MacDonald

I'm still interested in perfecting whatever talents I have and continuing to grow as an actor and continuing to be useful to the telling of the story. — Harrison Ford

Education is not filling the mind with a lot of facts. Perfecting the instrument and getting complete mastery of my own mind [is the ideal of education]. — Swami Vivekananda

She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them. — Tommy Wallach

I want to feel my own nothingness, I want to give myself up in absolute resignation to God, to lie prostrate and passive at His feet, with no other disposition in my heart than that of merging my will into His will, and no other language in my mouth than that of prayer for the perfecting of His strength in my weakness. — Thomas Chalmers

Begin with perfecting your daily life. That's the way to perfection. — Sri M

This journey of life is about realizing our inherent wholeness. It has nothing to do with perfecting anything — Renae A. Sauter

Fifty minutes, huh?" he muttered.
"Too long?" she managed with a teasing smile, knowing she longer had the strength to turn him away. She wanted Dalton to make love to her again. Needed him to.
He arched a brow. "You questioning my stamina?"
Laughing softly, she reached for his shirt, pulling him to her. "Not on your life. I know better. I was just thinking that for a man who spent years perfecting the eight second ride, fifty minutes might be quite a stretch."
Threading his fingers through her hair, he looked down at her. "The stretching part is no longer in question. Hell, much longer and it's gonna take a crow bar to get me out of these jeans."
"Then what are you waiting for? — Lindsey Brookes

In the big factory of perfecting human souls, the Earth was a kind of tumbler. The same as the kind people use to polish rocks. All souls come here to rub the sharp edges off each other. All of us, we're meant to be worn smooth by conflict and pain of every kind. To be polished. There was nothing bad about this. This wasn't suffering, it was erosion.It was just another, a basic, an important step in the refining process. — Chuck Palahniuk

By perfecting the circle, we kept moving without ever having to leave. — Nathan Blake

given a good idea to start with, it is better to concentrate on perfecting it than to hunt around for a new idea. One idea at a time is about as much as any one can handle. — Henry Ford

Looking back, I spent a lot of time sitting in pubs when I should have been perfecting my playwriting. — Jez Butterworth

I've spent most of my life perfecting the craft of living history. I have no practice at living in the present. — Leila Sales

If my ruling disposition is self-interest, I perceive that everything that happens to me is always for or against my self-interest; if, on the other hand, my ruling disposition is obedience to God, I perceive Him to be at work for my perfecting in everything that happens to me. — Oswald Chambers

Dr. Mitalipov, 52, has shaken the field of genetics by perfecting a version of the world's tiniest surgery: — Anonymous

I've been perfecting my death glare on her since she hit the bar. Sadly, it isn't working. — J. Lynn

Among the works of man, which human life is rightly employed in perfecting, the first in importance surely is man himself. — John Stuart Mill

A fundamental principle of Catholic theology is that grace perfects nature rather than setting it aside; and that means that the Christian life is not a two-layer cake, the supernatural simply added on to the natural. It transforms the natural but by perfecting it, not by demeaning it. — Peter Kreeft

When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness - the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don't fit with who we think we're supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. Our sense of worthiness - that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging - lives inside of our story. — Brene Brown

If you'd only met her in Gotham, for instance, I should have had a song all ready for you. When you came in, I was just perfecting a little song about a wild woman of Gotham, who made love to young men and then shot 'em - till — Leslie Charteris

Here was an expert who had spent years perfecting her craft, yet one of her best dishes was created under intense pressure, in a couple of hours. — Sendhil Mullainathan

To break up the superstition and worship of legality should be our aim. Nothing would please me more than to see Inspector Heat and his likes take to shooting us down in broad daylight with the approval of the public. Half our battle would be won then; the desintegration of the old morality would have set in in its very temple. That is what you ought to aim at. But you revolutionists will never understand that. You plan the future, you lose yourselves in reveries of economical systems derived from what is; where as what's wanted is a clean sweep and a clear start for a new conception of life. That sort of future will take care of itself if you will only make room for it. Therefore I would shovel my stuff in heaps at the corners of the streets if I had enough for that; and as I haven't, I do my best by perfecting a really dependable detonator. — Joseph Conrad

Palpatine sought power over others. Yoda sought power from within. Palpatine wanted control of everything, in the hopes of building what he thought would be a perfect universe. Yoda gave up the idea of controlling or perfecting the universe, in the hopes of understanding it. — Michael P. Kube-McDowell

I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent. — Gary Shteyngart

Basketball is an intricate, high-speed game filled with split-second, spontaneous decisions. But that spontaneity is possible only when everyone first engages in hours of highly repetitive and structured practice
perfecting their shooting, dribbling, and passing and running plays over and over again
and agrees to play a carefully defined role on the court ... spontaneity isn't random. — Malcolm Gladwell