"Who are you to judge the life I live?
I know I'm not perfect
-and I don't live to be-
but before you start pointing fingers...
make sure you hands are clean!"
— Bob Marley

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

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"One minute was enough, Tyler said, "A person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"I am careful not to confuse excellence with perfection. Excellence, I can reach for; perfection is God's business."
— Michael J. Fox

"If you look for perfection, you'll never be content."
— Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)

"When all the details fit in perfectly, something is probably wrong with the story."
— Charles Baxter (Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction)

"A minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection."
— Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club: A Novel)

"My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
With brows of the edge of a swallow's nest
My wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roof
And of steam on the panes
My wife with shoulders of champagne
And of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the ice
My wife with wrists of matches
My wife with fingers of luck and ace of hearts
With fingers of mown hay
My wife with armpits of marten and of beechnut
And of Midsummer Night
Of privet and of an angelfish nest
With arms of seafoam and of riverlocks
And of a mingling of the wheat and the mill
My wife with legs of flares
With the movements of clockwork and despair
My wife with calves of eldertree pith
My wife with feet of initials
With feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinking
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
With a nape of rolled stone and wet chalk
And of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinking
My wife with hips of a skiff
With hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathers
And of shafts of white peacock plumes
Of an insensible pendulum
My wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestos
My wife with buttocks of swans' backs
My wife with buttocks of spring
With the sex of an iris
My wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypus
My wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeat
My wife with a sex of mirror
My wife with eyes full of tears
With eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needle
My wife with savanna eyes
My wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prison
My wife with eyes of wood always under the axe
My wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire
"
— André Breton (Poems of Andre Breton: A Bilingual Anthology)

"Don't mistake activity with achievement."
— John Wooden

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
— Immanuel Kant

""A real girl isn't perfect, and a perfect girl isn't real." "
— Ummm a website

"There is still that singular perfection, and it's perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more."
— Michael Cunningham (The Hours)

"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
— Zadie Smith

"Have no fear of perfection -- you'll never reach it."
— Salvador Dalí

"The maxim, "Nothing prevails but perfection," may be spelled PARALYSIS."
— Winston S. Churchill

"We have all been expelled from the garden, but the ones who suffer most in exile are those who are still permitted to dream of perfection."
— Stanley Kunitz

"...you don't have to be perfect to be pretty"
— Carson Kressley

"When you stop expecting people to be perfect, you can like them for who they are."
— Donald Miller (A Million Miles In A Thousand Years: Why Some Live Make Sense And Others Don't)

"Katy was neither a Methodist nor a Masochist. She was a goddess and the silence of goddesses is genuinely golden. None of your superficial plating. A solid, twenty-two-carat silence all the way through. The Olympian's trap is kept shut, not by an act of willed discretion, but because there's really nothing to say. Goddesses are all of one piece. There's no internal conflict in them. Whereas the lives of people like you and me are one long argument. Desires on one side, woodpeckers on the other. Never a moment of real silence."
— Aldous Huxley (The Genius and the Goddess)

""I want to be loved, not in spite of my faults, but because of them.""
— Lise Bennett

"Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism. Confronting your fears and allowing yourself the right to be human can, paradoxically, make you a far happier and more productive person."
— David M. Burns

"Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible."
— Rebecca Solnit (Hope in the Dark)

"'Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe.... If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do."
— David Burns, M.D.

"A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"The world isn't perfect. But it's there for us, doing the best it can. And that's what makes it so damn beautiful." - Roy Mustang"
— Sho Aikawa

"The human beings at the helm of the new nation [USA], whatever their limitations [slave owners, anti-democracy], were truly revolutionary. The theory of liberty born in that era, the seed of the idea, was perfect.

More important, the idea itself carried within it the moral power to correct the contradictions in its execution that were obvious from the very birth of the new nation."
— Naomi Wolf (Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries)

"If everything is imperfect in this imperfect world, love is most perfect in its perfect imperfection. "
— Gunnar Björnstrand

"--You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.

He walked on, waiting to be spoken to, trailing his ashplant by his side. Its ferrule followed lightly on the path, squealing at his heels. My familiar, after me, calling, Steeeeeeeeeeeephen! A wavering line along the path. They will walk on it tonight, coming here in the dark. He wants that key. It is mine. I paid the rent. Now I eat his salt bread. Give him the key too. All. He will ask for it. That was in his eyes.

--After all, Haines began ...

Stephen turned and saw that the cold gaze which had measured him was not all unkind.

--After all, I should think you are able to free yourself. You are your own master, it seems to me.

--I am a servant of two masters, Stephen said, an English and an Italian.

--Italian? Haines said.

A crazy queen, old and jealous. Kneel down before me.

--And a third, Stephen said, there is who wants me for odd jobs.

--Italian? Haines said again. What do you mean?

--The imperial British state, Stephen answered, his colour rising, and the holy Roman catholic and apostolic church.

--I can quite understand that, he said calmly. An Irishman must think like that, I daresay. We feel in England that we have treated you rather unfairly. It seems history is to blame.

The proud potent titles clanged over Stephen's memory the triumph of their brazen bells: ET UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM ET APOSTOLICAM ECCLESIAM: the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars."
— James Joyce (Ulysses)

"Jerry: Oh, you don't understand, Osgood! Ehhhh... I'm a man.
Osgood: Well, nobody's perfect.
"
— Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot)

""The concept of life and perfection is incompatible. BUT so is death and perfection""
— Murray N. Rothbard

" The perfect normal person is rare in our civilization. "
— Karen Horney

""Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect"

"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them"

"What sin is that?"

"They evolved into us," he said."
— Robert Charles Wilson (Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America)

"Happiness consists in always aspiring perfection, the pause in any level in perfection is the pause of happiness"
— Leon Tolstoy

"Normal is over rated, and so is spelling.You want perfection? Go out and buy a spell check, but know this: Spellcheck won't keep you warm at night or love you unconditionaly. I will stick to being abnormal and a bad speller. Makes life more interesting. After all, what fun is there in being normal or perfect?"
— Cristina Marrero

"Absolute perfection is here and now, not in some future, near or far.
The secret is in action - here and now.
It is your behavior that blinds you to yourself.
Disregard whatever you think yourself to be and act as if you were absolutely perfect
- whatever your idea of perfection may be.
All you need is courage."
— Nisargadatta Maharaj