Quotes About Striving For Perfection

#1. Striving for excellence motivates you; striving for perfection is demoralizing.

Harriet B. Braiker

#2. I'd love to stay in baseball, but I won't beg. I'd love to work with young umpires. I think I could teach them, help them develop. I can spot flaws, help them get over the hump. You're striving for perfection every game, yet you never achieve it. If baseball wants me, I'm available.

Doug Harvey

#3. Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

Edward Abbey

#4. Striving for perfection can get in the way during the early stages of the creative process.

David Kelley

#5. Nobody gets everything they want. There will always be something. New problems arise. Instead of striving for perfection, strive for contentedness. Find a way to be happy what you already have & you'll always have exactly what you need.

Adam J. Kurtz

#6. Grain is life, there's all this striving for perfection with digital stuff. Striving is fine, but getting there is not great. I want a sense of the human and that is what breathes life into a picture. For me, imperfection is perfection.

Anton Corbijn

#7. Striving for perfection is neurotic; striving for excellence is progress. Excellence is continuous improvement. There is nothing that cannot be done better or improved the next time.

Shiv Khera

#8. There's no such thing as Perfection. But, in striving for perfection, we can achieve excellence.

Vince Lombardi

#9. Striving for excellence is a positive quality. Striving for perfection is self-defeating.

Melody Beattie

#10. Don't waste your time striving for perfection; instead, strive for excellence - doing your best.

Laurence Olivier

#11. This toxic striving for perfection is a female thing. How many men obsess about being perfect? For men, generally, good enough is good enough.

Jane Fonda

#12. We must have the courage to be imperfect while striving for perfection.

Patricia T. Holland

#13. I always had the sense that nothing was never good enough - striving for perfection. My mother and I had a sort of typical mother-daughter relationship.

Dorothy Hamill

#14. Perfection is what you are striving for, but perfection is an impossibility. However, striving for perfection is not an impossibility. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts.

John Wooden

#15. Consciously or unconsciously, we are all striving for perfection. Every being must attain to it.

Swami Vivekananda

#16. On this sacred path of Radical Acceptance, rather than striving for perfection, we discover how to love ourselves into wholeness.

Tara Brach

#17. Learn the difference between striving for excellence and striving for perfection. The first is attainable; the second is not.

Douglas Merrill

#18. Improvement in one area often adversely affects another area, and striving for perfection in one may lead to failure in another.

Stephen F. Rosenstiel

#19. I probably do have an obsessive personality, but striving for perfection has served me well.

Tom Ford

#20. Perfection, fortunately, is not the only alternative to mediocrity. A more sensible alternative is excellence. Striving for excellence is stimulating and rewarding; striving for perfection
in practically anything
is both neurotic and futile.

Ed Bliss

#21. Perfection is impossibility but striving for perfection is not. Do the best you can. That is what counts.

John Wooden

#22. None of us have reached the peak of perfection, but it shouldn't stop anyone from trying to make the climb.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#23. It's not about perfection; it's about the joy of striving.

Thomas Keller

#24. That is what great athletes can do: they give us a model of striving for human perfection.

Armstrong Williams

#25. When you acknowledge, as you must, that there is no such thing as perfect food, only the idea of it, then the real purpose of striving toward perfection becomes clear: to make people happy, that is what cooking is all about.

Thomas Keller

#26. ...adopt the "practice makes progress" approach

Mark Hawthorne

#27. The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.

Dean Koontz

#28. Not his match! And have you not the heart in you to be anything but best? How many are his match? How many in this world do you think stand in the front rank? Are all the rest of us to give up and sit on our hands rather than serve humbly where we deserve?

Edith Pargeter

#29. Often, when you've reached a very high level of achievement, you almost become paralyzed by the idea that anything you might do might be imperfect. Perfection is just the striving, the effort, the struggle, but it's hard to remember that.

Gelsey Kirkland

#30. My fabulous architect godfather and mentor told me once that striving toward a goal - or perfection - gives one focus and direction, which is a helluva lot better than chasing one's tail.

Catherine Stock

#31. Perfection is worth striving for, even if it is ultimately unattainable in this life.

Joseph B. Wirthlin

#32. Perfection may be an island out of reach, but setting your sails toward it makes for a magnificent voyage.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#33. The Qur'an does not ask for human perfection, but rather
asks that we persevere in striving for self-improvement and that we never
become complacent or despondent about our progress.

Jeffrey Lang

#34. Progress is a tension between the notion of perfection and the notion that striving, not finding, is important.

George Zebrowski

#35. When a man imagines, even after years of striving, that he has attained perfection, his decline begins.

Theodore Martin

#36. I feel like every role that you take there's a part of you that obviously feels like you can do it. I don't know if perfect is the right word because I don't believe in perfection and I don't think it exists but I think striving to do something well is in every single part.

Mila Kunis

#37. Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward the town to gather alms, and the two samanas recognized him solely by the perfection of his repose, by the calmness of his figure, in which there was no trace of seeking, desiring, imitating, or striving, only light and peace

Hermann Hesse

#38. Perfection is a paradigm meant to keep us striving and learning and growing. Like a wondrous sunset, perfection may be beyond our reach, but it is within our view and well worth seeking after.

Richelle E. Goodrich

#39. But everything takes a different shape when we pass from abstractions to reality. In the former, everything must be subject to optimism, and we must imagine the one side as well as the other striving after perfection and even attaining it. Will this ever take place in reality?

Carl Von Clausewitz

#40. Mutual funds dare to be average. In fact, they dare to be lousy. They have long since ceased striving for anything resembling perfection when it comes to managing your money.

Gary Weiss

#41. Each of us is merely one human being, merely an experiment, a way station. But each of us should be on the way toward perfection, should be striving to reach the center, not the periphery.

Hermann Hesse

#42. You can't ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

Paul Kalanithi

#43. As we're about to see, by striving for even greater genetic perfection we might be eliminating a lot more than just millions of people who don't fit the societal norms we've created. We might actually be eradicating the very solutions to the medical problems we're working so hard to solve.

Sharon Moalem