Imperfect Quotes - Page 17

• Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant--the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past--imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world--despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb--a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture.

  Hakim Bey

  Memories, Regret, Past

  Hakim Bey (2003). “T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism”, p.34, Autonomedia

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• But guilt is guilt. It doesn't go away. It can't be nullified. It can't even be fully understood, I'm certain - it's roots run too deep into private and long-standing karma. About the only thing that saves my neck when I get to feeling this way is that guilt is an imperfect form of knowledge. Just because it isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can't be used. The hard thing to do is to put it to practical use, before it gets around to paralyzing you.

  J. D. Salinger

  Karma, Running, Mean

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• Each of us A cell of awareness Imperfect and incomplete Genetic blends With uncertain ends On a fortune hunt that's far too fleet

  Neil Peart

  Cells, Awareness, Ends

  "Song: "Freewill" ("Permanent Waves")". 1980.

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• A god whose creation is so imperfect that he must be continually adjusting it to make it work properly seems to me a god of relatively low order, hardly worthy of any worship.

  Martin Gardner

  Order, Religion, Adjusting

  Martin Gardner (2005). “The New Ambidextrous Universe: Symmetry and Asymmetry from Mirror Reflections to Superstrings”, p.136, Courier Corporation

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• Let's be honest. There's not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.

  Bob Parsons

  Business, People, Honest

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• When your eyes are functioning well you don't see your eyes. If your eyes are imperfect you see spots in front of them. That means there are some lesions in the retina or wherever, and because your eyes aren't working properly, you feel them. In the same way, you don't hear your ears. If you have a ringing in your ears it means there's something wrong with your ears. Therefore, if you do feel yourself, there must be something wrong with you. Whatever you have, the sensation of I is like spots in front of your eyes - it means something's wrong with your functioning.

  Alan Watts

  Mean, Eye, Imperfection

  Alan Watts (1977). “The essence of Alan Watts”, Celestial Arts Publishing Company

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• Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

  George Eliot

  Beautiful, Struggle, Errors

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2784, Delphi Classics

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• You have been taught that there is something wrong with you and that you are imperfect, but there isn't and you're not.

  Cheri Huber

  Compassion, Taught, Has Beens

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• We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.

  Atul Gawande

  Pain, Medicine, Intuition

  Atul Gawande (2010). “Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science”, p.7, Profile Books

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• Let us labor for an inward stillness-- An inward stillness and an inward healing. That perfect silence where the lips and heart Are still, and we no longer entertain Our own imperfect thoughts and vain opinions, But God alone speaks to us and we wait In singleness of heart that we may know His will, and in the silence of our spirits, That we may do His will and do that only

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Healing, Heart, Perfect

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (2012). “My Complete Poetical Works (Annotated Edition)”, p.1264, Jazzybee Verlag

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• I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

  Ian Caldwell

  Art, Book, Reading

  Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason (2005). “The rule of four”, Egully.com

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• It was my view then, and still is, that you don't make war without knowing why. Knowledge of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can't fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can't make them undead.

  Tim O'Brien

  War, Mistake, Views

  Tim O'Brien (2009). “The Things They Carried”, p.38, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It may seem sometimes as if a culture of peace does not stand a chance against the culture of war, the culture of violence and the cultures of impunity and intolerance. Peace may indeed be a complex challenge, dependent on action in many fields and even a bit of luck from time to time. It may be a painfully slow process, and fragile and imperfect when it is achieved. But peace is in our hands. We can do it.

  Kofi Annan

  Time, Peace, War

  "Secretary-General Stresses Need for Culture of Peace". Kofi Annan's message for the occasion of the International Day of Peace (September 14), www.un.org. September 10, 1999.

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• Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted.

  Francois de La Rochefoucauld

  Happiness, Beautiful, Stills

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• It's just that...I just think that some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic. It's the universe's way of providing contrast, you know? There have to be a few holes in the road. It's how life is.

  Sarah Dessen

  Inspirational, Life, Thinking

  Sarah Dessen (2006). “The Truth About Forever”, p.69, Penguin

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• How can the mind be so imperfect?" she says with a smile. I look at my hands. Bathed in the moonlight, they seem like statues, proportioned to no purpose. "It may well be imperfect," I say, "but it leaves traces. And we can follow those traces, like footsteps in the snow." "Where do the lead?" "To oneself," I answer. "That's where the mind is. Without the mind, nothing leads anywhere." I look up. The winter moon is brilliant, over the Town, above the Wall. "Not one thing is your fault," I comfort her.

  Haruki Murakami

  Wall, Winter, Moon

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• Whether or not you believe in God, you must believe this: when we as a species abandon our trust in a power greater than us, we abandon our sense of accountability. Faiths… all faiths… are admonitions that there is something we cannot understand, something to which we are accountable. With faith we are accountable to each other, to ourselves, and to a higher truth. Religion is flawed, but only because man is flawed. The church consists of a brotherhood of imperfect, simple souls wanting only to be a voice of compassion in a world spinning out of control.

  Dan Brown

  Faith, Believe, Simple

  "Angels and Demons". Book by Dan Brown, 2000.

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• But aren't many gardens beautiful because they are imperfect?...aren't the strange, new flowers that arise by mistake or misadventure as pleasing as the well-tended and planned?

  Libba Bray

  Beauty, Beautiful, Mistake

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• I'm pretty comfortable with my body. I'm imperfect. The imperfections are there. People are going to see them, but I take the view you only live once.

  Kate Hudson

  Inspirational, Beauty, Beautiful

  Interview With Nigel Farndale, www.telegraph.co.uk. May 17, 2010.

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• Beauty is variable, ugliness is constant.

  Douglas Horton

  Beauty, Variables, Constant

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• Beauty is only skin deep.

  Thomas Overbury

  Inspirational, Beauty, Skins

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• What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things.

  Albrecht Durer

  Beauty, Knows

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• I start ... from a belief in individual freedom and that derives fundamentally from a belief in the limitations of our knowledge, from a belief ... that nobody can be sure that what he believes is right, is really right ... I'm an imperfect human being who cannot be certain of anything, so what position ... involved the least intolerance on my part? ... The most attractive position ... is putting individual freedom first.

  Milton Friedman

  Freedom, Believe, Firsts

  Interview with Tibor Machan, Joe Cobb, Ralph Raico, reason.com. December 1974.

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• That's why I like listening to Schubert while I'm driving. Like I said, it's because all his performances are imperfect. A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of - that a certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect. And personally I find that encouraging.

  Haruki Murakami

  Eye, Perfect, Listening

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from Jan 07, 2015

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• Our own theory is that sin was ordained only in view of redemption, and that accordingly redemption shows forth as the gain bound up with sin; in comparison with which there can be no question whatever of mischief due to sin, for the merely gradual and imperfect unfolding of the power of the God-consciousness is one of the necessary conditions of the human stage of existence.

  Friedrich Schleiermacher

  Views, Redemption, Gains

  Friedrich Schleiermacher (2016). “The Christian Faith”, p.338, Bloomsbury Publishing

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