The pursuit of perfection is frustrating and a waste of time, because nothing is ever perfect.
The pursuit of excellence is commendable and worthwhile. Therefore strive for excellence not perfection.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.
You don’t have to be part of a club to know Jesus. And you don’t have to be part of a scene to know Jesus. And you don’t have to be perfect to know Jesus. You don’t even have to be semi-perfect to know Jesus. You just have to be willing, and open, and honest.
As it acts in the world, the Tao is like the bending of a bow. The top is bent downward; the bottom is bent up. It adjusts excess and deficiency so that there is perfect balance.
We don’t need more money, we don’t need greater success or fame, we don’t need the perfect body or even the perfect mate-right now, at this very moment, we have a mind, which is all the basic equipment we need to achieve complete happiness.
So would a Being, endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence, watching man and his doings, smile about man's illusion that he was acting according to his own free will.
Now an infinite happiness cannot be purchased by any price less than that which is infinite in value; and infinity of merit can only result from a nature that is infinitely divine or perfect
The history of the human race, viewed as a whole, may be regarded as the realization of a hidden plan of nature to bring about a political constitution, internally, and for this purpose, also externally perfect, as the only state in which all the capacities implanted by her in mankind can be fully developed.
The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.
We maintain, and have said in the Ethics, if the arguments there adduced are of any value, that happiness is the realization and perfect exercise of virtue, and this not conditional, but absolute. And I used the term 'conditional' to express that which is indispensable, and 'absolute' to express that which is good in itself.