How to Be Perfect Quotes

“in the words of Samuel Beckett: Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better. —MAYA ANGELOU”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“true happiness comes from remaining focused on the things we do, and doing them with no purpose other than to do them.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“A person is a person through other people.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Quoting the great Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, she tells us that “ ‘knowledge makes men gentle,’ just as ignorance hardens us.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“The individual does not and cannot exist alone.… He owes his existence to other people including those of past generations and his contemporaries. He is simply part of the whole.… Whatever happens to the individual happens to the whole group, and whatever happens to the whole group happens to the individual. The individual can only say, “I am, because we are; and since we are therefore I am.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“in as few words as possible, how to try to pull off the nearly impossible task of living a good life on earth. Here’s what they wrote: Know thyself. and Nothing in excess.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“The most important part of becoming better people, I’ll say yet again, is that we care about whether what we do is good or bad, and therefore try to do the right thing. If we love a problematic person or thing too much to part with it altogether, I think that means we have to keep two ideas in our head at the same time: I love this thing. The person who made it is troubling.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Confronting our behavior may be painful and annoying, but it’s also a remedy for apathy, which is the enemy of improvement.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“The best thing about Aristotle’s “constant learning, constant trying, constant searching” is what results from it: a mature yet still pliable person, brimming with experiences both old and new, who doesn’t rely solely on familiar routines or dated information about how the world works.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“This habituation, the practice of working at our virtues, is really the whole shebang here.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Nature, habit, and teaching,” says Aristotle, “are all needed.” Because flourishing, you see, doesn’t just require us to identify and then acquire all of these virtues—it requires that we have every one in the exact right amount. We have to be generous but not too generous, courageous but not too courageous, and so on.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Part of the wonder of being human is that we get to learn about the extraordinary levels of virtue of which other humans are capable.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“... There is no way to achieve a higher-level enjoyment from running, because there's no way to achieve any enjoyment from running, because there is nothing enjoyable about running. Running is awful, and no one should ever doe it unless they are being chased by a bear.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Descartes saw his own singular consciousness as proof of existence. Practioners of ubuntu see our existence as conditional on others' existence.”
― Michael Schur, How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Act only out of duty to follow a universal maxim
Derive these maxims using your pure reason
Happiness is irrelevant
End of poem”
― Michael Schur, How to be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“Virtue comes about,” he writes, “not by a process of nature, but by habituation.… We become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“President Trump put his son-in-law Jared Kushner in charge of constructing a new Israel-Palestine peace plan. Kushner had no experience authoring international treaties of any kind, so the announcement was met with skepticism. When Kushner released his plan at the beginning of 2020, he proudly announced that he had “read twenty-five books” on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To date, Israel and Palestine have not achieved peace.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“We’re not really going to discuss René Descartes, but consider for a second his famous Enlightenment formulation Cogito, ergo sum—the aforementioned “I think, therefore I am”—which, again, is one of the very foundations of Western thought. When we place it next to this ubuntu formulation—“I am, because we are”—well, man oh man, that’s a pretty big difference.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“To put cruelty first,” she writes, is to disregard the idea of sin as it is understood by revealed religion. Sins are transgressions of a divine rule and offenses against God.… However, cruelty—the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to cause anguish and fear—is a wrong done entirely to another creature. When we think only of religious “sins” as the ultimate bad stuff we want to avoid, we end up manufacturing justifications for horrible atrocities; her example is the European conquerors coming to the “New World,” encountering its Indigenous peoples, and rationalizing genocide as the will of a Christian God. If we elevate cruelty—transgressions against other humans—to the top of the “worst crimes we can commit” list, we can no longer find and exploit any such loopholes.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“The amount of time something has been done is not, by itself, a good reason to keep doing it. By relying solely on precedent and failing to critically examine the problems that precedent might create for us, we’re basically just flipping the middle finger to the idea of progress, or finding ways to be better people.7 We’re actively not trying to be better, and worse, we’re seeing the not-trying as a virtue. This benefits no one.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“These moments—when we are caught in a situation that has no clear answer, no heuristic to employ that will spit out a theoretical but practically impossible “correct” decision—are when we see the true value in failure. We’re deciding to do something that will, someday, backfire. The more we chew on it and work it through, the more meaning we can derive from that backfire when it happens.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“You are people on earth. You are not alone here, and that means you owe the other people on earth certain things. What you owe them, more or less, is to live by rules they wouldn’t reject as unfair (assuming they’re decent, reasonable people). (...) If you feel like those people could reasonably reject your idea for what to do, maybe don’t do it. Maybe do something else.
Or you can try this: You can think to yourself, before you do something, “Would it be okay if everyone did this? What would the world be like if every single person were allowed to do whatever I’m about to do?” If that world seems twisted, or unfair, or nonsensical, you should probably do something else.
Or: Think about what you’re about to do, and imagine the result. Think of how many people will be happy, and how many sad, and how happy or sad they’ll be. Think about how soon they’ll be sad or happy, and for how long they’ll be sad or happy. Try to total it all up in your mind, and think about whether what you’re about to do will result in more total sadness or happiness. This one is tricky, but sometimes it’s the best way to find an answer.
And while you’re here on earth, think about the parts of people you love—their kindness, generosity, loyalty, courage, determination, mildness. Aim yourselves at the exact right amount of those qualities, as best you can—not too much, not too little. And know that you’re going to get it wrong. You’ll try to be mild, let’s say, and you won’t be mild enough, then you’ll overcompensate and become too mild, and that’ll keep happening, and it’ll annoy people, and that will sting. But hopefully, by trying over and over, you’ll get
closer and closer to getting it right. The trying is important. Keep trying.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“There is a certain strain of modern Western sociopolitical thinker that aggressively admires “meritocracy.” Every society should be a meritocracy, argue these adherents, and we should not pass laws that favor one group of people over another, for any reason. There should be no affirmative action laws for university admissions, no initiatives
to gender-balance workforces. The cream shall simply rise to the top! These people (usually heterosexual, rich, white men, with a bookshelf full of Ayn Rand novels) conveniently forget that for a meritocracy to work—for a society to properly value and celebrate hard work and individual success —the people within the society need to start from
the same point of origin. Otherwise, the cream isn’t rising to the top— the people who were closest to the top already are rising to the top, and the whole concept of meritocracy crumbles to dust. What they are actually calling for, these people, is a pseudo-meritocracy that does not distinguish between the accomplishments of a man with a Mayflower last name who inherited a billion dollars from his dad and those of a Black woman who was born into poverty in a redlined
neighborhood in a state that enforces draconian, racist laws. (Some people, as the old saying goes, were born on third base and think they hit a triple.) It’s not a meritocracy if some runners start the race ten feet from the finish line and some are denied entry to the race because of systemic biases within the Racing Commission.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“To demand perfection, or to hold people to impossible standards, is to deny the simple and beautiful reality that nobody is perfect.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“In a fractured national moment of stress and pain, of inequality and injustice, of ethical strain and Moral Exhaustion, we should go easy on ourselves at moments when we fail in our quest to become better people. But we cannot forget this simple truth: we owe things to each other. They may be small things, or simple things, but they’re there, they’re important, and we can’t ignore them.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is there something I could be doing that’s better? Why is it better?”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“But there’s a serious point here: the shifting of an Overton window often happens gradually, and we readjust to its new range very quickly,9 so there is risk in allowing ourselves to do anything we know is bad just because we want to. In fact, even with good intentions and level heads, if we give in to our lesser instincts too often there’s a far more likely outcome than “we become black market weapons dealers.” It’s simply that we become selfish. We start to believe that our own “right” to do whatever we want, whenever we want to do it, is more important than anything else, and thus our sense of morality concerns only our own happiness or pain.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“in those rare times when you have to make a decision and you assemble the pieces in exactly the right way, so the image of what to do comes sharply into focus—you will feel alive and fulfilled and elated. You will feel like you’re flourishing.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question

“The golden mean of anger—which, again, Aristotle calls “mildness”—represents an appropriate amount of anger, reserved for the right situations, to be directed at people who deserve it. Like fascists, or corrupt politicians, or anyone associated with the New York Yankees.”
― Michael Schur, How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question