This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"The purpose of Zen is the perfection of character." - Yamada Koun Zenshin, or Koun Yamada or Yamada Roshi
"Not alms but self-sacrifice leads man to perfection." - Jacob ben Aaron of Karlin
"Every man, woman and child holds the possibility of physical perfection: it rests with each of us to attain it by personal understanding and effort." - Matthias Alexander, fully Frederick Matthias Alexander
"Trifles make perfection; but perfection is no trifle." - Michelangelo, aka Michaelangelo Buonarroti, fully Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni NULL
"Perfection consists not in doing extraordinary things, but in doing ordinary things extraordinarily well. Neglect nothing; the most trivial action may be performed to God." - Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, or Arnault, called La Mère Angélique
"The humorous man recognizes that absolute purity, absolute justice, absolute logic and perfection are beyond human achievement and that men have been able to live happily for thousands of years in a state of genial frailty." - Brooks Atkinson, fully Justin Brooks Atkinson
"This is the very perfection of a man, to find out his own imperfection." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Life itself is the expression of evolution... Everything that exists is merely matter in motion. In the same way, perfection is always a temporary relative motion. Humanity is relative... We are at such a low expression of consciousness that we have not yet seriously studied ourselves... Development is circular... Everything is constantly moving at higher, faster, more refined, complex levels of being... We will be here as quantitative motion until we reach a state of motion that is qualitative, revolutionary. Then we will be somewhere else!" - Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones
"We are what we are; we cannot be truly other than ourselves. We reach perfection not by copying, much less by aiming at originality, by constantly and steadily working out the life which is common to all, according to the character which God has given us." - Anne Baxter
"Poetry should be vital - either stirring our blood by its divine movements or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory, to do either is enduring fame." - Augustine Birrell
"Man, though chained to earth, looks across time and space toward an unknown perfection which he may never reach but will forever seek." - Francis Scott Bradford
"Discretion is the perfection of reason, and a guide to us in all the duties of life. It is only found in men of sound sense and understanding." - Jean de La Bruyère
"Art does not surpass nature, but only brings it to perfection." - Miguel de Cervantes, fully Miguel de Cervantes Saaversa
"To reach perfection, we must be made sensible of our failings, either by the admonitions of friends, or the invectives of enemies." - Diogenes Laërtius, aka "Diogenes the Cynic"
"He that resolves upon any great and good end, has, by the very resolution, scaled the chief barrier to it. He will find such resolution removing difficulties, searching out or making means, giving courage for despondency, and strength for weakness and like the star to the wise men of old, ever guiding him nearer and nearer to perfection." - Tyron Edwards
"If we had strength and faith enough to trust ourselves entirely to God, and follow Him simply wherever He should lead us, we should have no need of any great effort of mind to reach perfection." - François Fénelon, fully Francois de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon
"Aristotle said that all creative people are dissatisfied because they are looking for happiness in perfection and seeking for things that do not exist. This is one of the hopes of the world. There is no progress where people are satisfied. Discontent is perhaps the most potent challenge to improvement." - Clarence Edwin Flynn
"It may be difficult, too, for many of us, to abandon the belief that there is an instinct towards perfection at work in human beings, which has brought them to their present high level of intellectual achievement and ethical sublimation and which may be expected to watch over their development as supermen. I have no faith, however, in the existence of any such internal instinct and I cannot see how this benevolent illusion is to be preserved. The present development of human beings requires, as it seems to me, no different explanation from that of animals. What appears in a minority of human individuals as an untiring impulsion towards further perfection can easily be understood as a result of the instinctual repression upon which is based all that is most precious in human civilization." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud
"The true artist sees the harmony, the wholeness, the tendencies toward perfection in things everywhere." - Peggy Guggenheim, formally Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim
"The practical man is the adventurer, the investigator, the believer in research, the asker of questions, the man who refuses to believe that perfection has been attained... There is no thrill or joy in merely doing that which any one can do... It is always safe to assume, not that the old way is wrong, but that there may be a better way." - Henry Robert Harrower
"It is of things heavenly and universal declaration, working in them whose hearts God inspireth with the due consideration thereof, and habit or disposition of mind whereby they are made fit vessels both for the receipt and delivery of whatsoever spiritual perfection." - Richard Hooker
"Love is represented as the fulfilling of the law, a creature’s perfection. All other graces, all divine dispensations contribute to this, and are lost in it as in a heaven. It expels the dross of our nature; it overcomes sorrow; it is the full joy of our Lord." - Richard Hooker
"Let life teach you what spirit it... By conforming to spiritual ideals imposed from the outside through the force of tradition, people often channel themselves into models of behavior that violate their inner essence. We are all guaranteed realization when we strip away our pre-conceived notions about spiritual perfection, give up striving form some idealized end-point called 'enlightenment,' and discover the magnificence of what we already are and live that fully." - W. Brugh Joy, fully William Brugh Joy
"There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung
"As there is an infinite number of possible universes in the ideas of God, and as only one can exist, there must be sufficient reason for God’s choice, to determine him to one rather than to another. And this reason can only be found in the fitness, or in the degrees of perfection, which these worlds contain." - Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz
"To realize in its completeness the universal beauty and perfection of the works of God, we must recognize a certain perpetual and very free progress of the whole universe, such that it is always going forward to greater improvement... Although many substances have already attained a great perfection, yet on account of the infinite divisibility of the continuous, there always remain in the abyss of things slumbering parts which have yet to be awakened, to grow in size and worth, and, in a word, to advance to a more perfect state. And hence no end of progress is ever reached." - Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz
"We are born with faculties and powers capable of almost anything, such as at least would carry us further than can be easily imagined; but it is only the exercise of those powers which gives us ability and skill in anything, and leads us towards perfection." - John Locke
"The fundamental rights, like the right to existence and life; the right to personal freedom or to conduct one’s own life as master of oneself and of one’s acts, responsible for them before God and the law of the community; the right to the pursuit of the perfection of moral and rational human life; the right to keep one’s body whole; the right to private ownership of material goods, which is a safeguard of the liberties of the individual; the right to marry according to one’s choice and to raise a family which will be assured of the liberties due it; the right of association, the respect for human dignity in each individual, whether or not he represents an economic value for society - all these rights are rooted in the vocation of the person (a spiritual and free agent) to the order of absolute values and to a destiny superior to time." - Jacques Maritain
"On a mural Francis Scott Bradford has depicted the life of man. A heroic figure of man is painted as chained to the skyscrapers of his cities, rearing up, stretching his chains, peering onward into the stars and planets of the heavens. And the scroll inscribes the summary: "Man, though chained to earth, looks across time and space toward an unknown perfection which he may never reach but will forever seek."" -
"All perfection is melancholy." - Margaret Oliphant, fully Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant, née Margaret Oliphant Wilson
"Beauty of form affects the mind, but then it must not be the mere shell that we admire, but the thought that this shell is only the beautiful case adjusted to the shape and value of a still more beautiful pearl within. The perfection of outward loveliness is the soul shining through its crystalline covering." - Jane Porter
"Is not time the image of Eternity because it effects the perfecting of earthly natures just as Eternity is the container and preserver of being?... Things which proceed from Eternity are not able to share in a stable perfection, whole and unchanging, are under the dominion of time." - Proclus, fully Proclus Lycaeus NULL
"The works of a person that builds begin immediately to decay, while those of him who plants begin directly to improve. In this, planting promises a more lasting pleasure than building; which, were it to remain in equal perfection, would at best begin to moulder and want repairs in imagination. Now trees have a circumstance that suits our taste and that is annual variety." - William Shenstone
"The golden thread in the mind of man is the light that leads towards excellence as a human objective. If perfection is a divine attribute, excellence is a human incentive and a healthy aim, even when we fall short of the target." - Aloysius Michael Sullivan
"The end is the source of everything that exists in the cause and the end of everything that exists in the effect... end, cause and effect, exist in the greatest and least things... To think from ends is the method of wisdom, from causes that of intelligence, and from effects that of knowledge. From this it may be seen that all perfection increases in and according to the ascent to higher degrees." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"We are not speaking of the perfection of life, forces, and forms as increasing or decreasing according to the degrees of extension or continuity, because these degrees are generally known; but as ascending or descending according to the degrees of ascent, or discrete (discontinuous) degrees, can be but little known from things visible in the natural world." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg
"In the night we stumble over things and become acutely conscious of their separateness, but the day reveals the unity which embraces them. And the man whose inner vision is bathed in consciousness at once realizes the spiritual unity which reigns over all racial differences, and his mind no longer stumbles over individual facts, accepting them as final. He realizes that peace is an inner harmony and not an outer adjustment, that beauty carries the assurance of our relationship to reality, which waits for its perfection in the response of our love." -
"The current of the world has its boundaries, otherwise it could have no existence, but its purpose is not shown in the boundaries which restrain it, but in its movement, which is toward perfection. The wonder is not that there should be obstacles and sufferings in this world, but that there should be law and order, beauty and joy, goodness and love." -
"The soul, advancing ever to the source of light and all perfection, lives, adores, and reigns in cloudless knowledge, purity and bliss." - Henry Ware
"All things, by desiring their own perfection, desire God Himself; inasmuch as the perfection of all things are so many similitudes of the divine essence." - Saint Thomas Aquinas, aka Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis or Doctor Universalis
"It is by insisting on an impossible standard of perfection that sceptics make themselves secure." - A. J. Ayer, Alfred Jules Ayer
"The dignity of man and the dignity of faith require the recognition of freedom to choose the truth, and freedom in the truth. Freedom cannot be identified with goodness or truth or perfection: it is by nature autonomous, it is freedom and not goodness." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev