Perfection Unattainable Quotes & Sayings

True perfection is unattainable, but if you chase perfection you will catch excellence! — Vince Lombardi

Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable. — Peter Watts

Philosophers say that perfection is unattainable. Lithographers redefine perfection according to SEMI standards. — Ken Goldberg

...the state of perfection is an elusive goal; demanding something so obscure as almost unattainable and can become a compulsive, crazy making squirrel-on-a-wheel way of living. — David W. Earle

To improve ourselves, to move toward that goal, perfection, that puts no less a demand on us for being unattainable, requires solitude, removal from the concerns of everyday life. And yet constant solitude renders self-improvement impossible, if not pointless. A balance must be struck between meditating in solitude and then applying this to your everyday life. — Leo Tolstoy

Another one of my favorite posters at Facebook declares in big red letters, "Done is better than perfect." I have tried to embrace this motto and let go of unattainable standards. Aiming for perfection causes frustration at best and paralysis at worst. — Sheryl Sandberg

Don't strive for somebody else's notion of perfection. It's an unattainable and ultimately ridiculous goal. Strive instead to be uniquely yourself and when in doubt listen to your gut, because it already knows what you want to become. — Meredith Vieira

Black-and-white thinking is the addict's mentality, which can be a bar to recovery when one is still active. But an addict who finds the willingness can then rely on the same trait to stay clean: "Just don't drink," they say in AA.
How's that going to work for an addicted eater? Food addicts have to take the tiger out of the cage three times a day. I've read that some drinkers have tried "controlled drinking," and it hasn't been very successful. Eaters don't just have to try it; they must practice it to survive.
Having a food plan is an attempt to address that, and having clear boundaries is a key to its working. But the comfort of all or nothing is just out of reach.
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I'm saying that food addicts, unlike alcoholics and may others, have both to try for perfection and to accept that perfection is unattainable, and that the only tool left is a wholesome discipline.
The problem is, if we had any clue about wholesome discipline, we wouldn't be addicts. — Michael Prager

For whatever it's worth, I believe we're born imperfect, and perfection, whatever that may be, is unattainable by us mere humans. — Liza M. Wiemer

What makes this constant assessing and comparing so self-defeating is that we are often comparing our lives, our marriages, our families, and our communities to unattainable, media-driven visions of perfection, or we're holding up our reality against our own fictional account of how great someone else has it. Nostalgia is also a dangerous form of comparison. — Brene Brown

Perfectionism is self destructive simply because there's no such thing as perfect. Perfection is an unattainable goal. — Brene Brown

Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn't going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book. — Laurell K. Hamilton

Aim at perfection in everything?, though in most things it is unattainable. However, they who aim at it, and persevere, will come much nearer to it than those whose laziness and despondency make them give it up as unattainable. - Chesterfield. — Orison Swett Marden

A man can do his best only by confidently seeking (and perpetually missing) an unattainable perfection. — Ralph Barton Perry

The inexorable search for a stanza of meaning hangs like a thundercloud over the troposphere of humankind's prosaic existence. A dithering sense of loss engulfs us. Humankind's unattainable desire to achieve a slice of perfection generates a suspenseful haze of doom. A lingering stab of incompleteness coupled with the tantalizing riddles of fate are inalterably interlinked and imbued in all thinking people's tormented soul. This cross coalescence of unattainable longing melds with the mystic tinged edges of uncertainty, spawned by the unanswerable questions posed by fate, fomenting a dialectical dissonance that distinguishes and ultimately exemplifies the arc of humankind's plaintive subsistence. — Kilroy J. Oldster

shame is the voice of perfectionism. Whether we're talking about appearance, work, motherhood, health or family, it's not the quest for perfection that is so painful; it's failing to meet the unattainable expectations that lead to the painful wash of shame. — Brene Brown

SCREW PERFECTION. Perfect is the archenemy of Better. Perfect is boring. Perfect is unattainable. — Fay Wolf

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

The scope for improvement is infinite, precisely because perfection is unattainable. — George Soros

To train in the martial arts is like being apprenticed to frustration, to the burn of effort, and the unattainable criteria of perfection. There's no glamour, no reward beyond the ones you create in your own heart. You struggle along the path and your teacher goads you or challenges you, always three steps ahead and always waiting, his eyes betraying nothing but demanding everything. And you try to give it. — John Donohue

The maxims tell you to aim at perfection, which is well; but it's unattainable, all the same. — Bayard Taylor

Like the librarians of Babel in Borges's story, who are looking for the book that will provide them with the key to all the others, we oscillate between the illusion of perfection and the vertigo of the unattainable. In the name of completeness, we would like to believe that a unique order exists that would enable us to accede in knowledge all in one go; in the name of the unattainable, we would like to think that order and disorder are in fact the same word, denoting pure chance.
It's possible also that both are decoys, illusions intended to disguise the erosion of both books and systems. It is no bad thing in any case that between the two our bookshelves should serve from time to time as joggers of the memory, as cat-rests and as lumber-rooms. — Georges Perec

Don't aim for perfect. Aim for complete. Perfection is an unattainable illusion. — Lisa Genova

Is there really such a thing as perfection? Of course not! It's a myth, a vicious rumor. — Aimee Cohen

Perfection is worth striving for, even if it is ultimately unattainable in this life. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe "we must be this" we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down. — Brene Brown

For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian--ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection that unattainable by the highest art. — Lytton Strachey

Perfection is something everyone strives for, but it's elusive and may be an illusion. — R.L. Griffin

Perfection is the enemy of greatness. We as people are limited in the knowledge and information we have, so to say one has reached all of the highest standards of what is known as the conventional consummation of human excellence means there is nothing more they would have to learn. This of course, is impossible, for there are always new things to learn, and so perfection is unachievable and unattainable. — Nocturnus Libertus

Dwight Langley, the painter, is the pure exponent of the evil the play is attacking; he is, in effect, the spokesman for Platonism, who explicitly preaches that beauty is unreachable in this world and perfection unattainable. Since he insists that ideals are impossible on earth, he cannot, logically enough, believe in the reality of any ideal, even when it actually confronts him. Thus, although he knows every facet of Kay Gonda's face, he (alone among the characters) does not recognize her when she appears in his life. This philosophically induced blindness, which motivates his betrayal of her, is a particularly brilliant concretization of the play's theme, and makes a dramatic Act I curtain. — Ayn Rand

Religion requires perfection, but the kingdom values excellence. If we strive for perfection and don't allow ourselves room to be wrong, we will never grow. Perfection is an unattainable destination, but excellence is an exciting journey. It's a journey in which we allow the Holy Spirit to teach, guide, and mentor us. If you strive to never make a mistake, you will make the biggest one by never stepping out in faith. — Bob Hazlett

Perfection is unattainable, so I like to live in imperfection. — Nikki Sixx

Perfection is not to be attained, but to be pursued infinitely. — Abhijit Naskar

I'm starting to understand that attempting to be perfect has been the goal of my life. Our lives. Attempting to be this fault-free, smiling person in this loving, happy family that fits so perfectly in this pretty, inoffensive little town. What was so bad about that goal after all? Only that I couldn't do it. That I let everybody down. I've been so down about it, so depressed thinking about all the balls I was trying to juggle that I've dropped, and now the cogs are turning toward total apathy toward it all, everything and all I can think about is that I am a shell of a human being. I'm a pushover. I'm to blame. — Abigail Tarttelin

-no matter what we do, we'll never succeed in attaining the 'perfect' body or the 'perfect' face. This isn't just because perfection is an unattainable goal; it's because capitalism relies on people being constantly unhappy so it can keep selling us the promise that consumerism will make our lives better. — Clementine Ford

Even within perfection, there are flaws. These flaws carry an unattainable beauty, which is indifferent to the human nature. — Nocturnus Libertus