Imperfection Quotes
By Alan Reiner – July 19, 2024
‘Perfection itself is imperfection.’ – Vladimir Horowitz
‘There is a kind of beauty in imperfection.’ – Conrad Hall
‘Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.’ – Marilyn Monroe
‘There is no real beauty without some slight imperfection.’ – James Salter
‘There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.’ – Eugene Kennedy
‘There is beauty and humility in imperfection.’ – Guillermo del Toro
‘Public policy is a study in imperfection. It involves imperfect people, with imperfect information, facing deeply imperfect choices – so it’s not surprising that they’re getting imperfect results.’ – Jake Sullivan
‘Imperfection is perfection.’ – Flume
‘I think every single imperfection adds to your beauty. I’d rather be imperfect than perfect.’ – Sonam Kapoor
‘Persuade thyself that imperfection and inconvenience are the natural lot of mortals, and there will be no room for discontent, neither for despair.’ – Tokugawa Ieyasu
‘To bear with patience wrongs done to oneself is a mark of perfection, but to bear with patience wrongs done to someone else is a mark of imperfection and even of actual sin.’ – Thomas Aquinas
‘It’s not about finding relevance or perfection or imperfection in objects, but it’s that you can accept yourself and then go out and accept others.’ – Jeff Koons
‘There’s beauty in imperfection.’ – Kirti Kulhari
‘Imperfection and perfection go so hand in hand, and our dark and our light are so intertwined, that by trying to push the darkness or the so-called negative aspects of our life to the side… we are preventing ourselves from the fullness of life.’ – Jeff Bridges
‘Imperfection is the new perfection.’ – Hina Khan
‘It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.’ – Soren Kierkegaard
‘Imperfection is relatable.’ – Lauren Conrad
‘I think that’s the most beautiful thing about being confident – just loving yourself, not caring what everybody else thinks. Because you could be Mother Theresa, and people are still going to try to find some imperfection.’ – Joanna Krupa
‘Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.’ – Henry Petroski
‘I find beauty in imperfection.’ – Rachel Morrison
‘It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others.’ – Joseph Addison
‘I love everything about my body. Every bit of it… the cellulite, the stretch marks, everything that I thought at one point was an imperfection, I now realize is everything that makes me unique.’ – Denise Bidot
‘The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.’ – Jane Austen
‘If someone is too perfect they won’t look good. Imperfection is important.’ – Eric Cantona
‘Imperfection is fine.’ – Anna Wintour
‘Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.’ – Thomas de Quincey
‘There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.’ – H. G. Wells
‘As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.’ – Ernst Fischer
‘It is imperfection – not perfection – that is the end result of the program written into that formidably complex engine that is the human brain, and of the influences exerted upon us by the environment and whoever takes care of us during the long years of our physical, psychological and intellectual development.’ – Rita Levi-Montalcini
‘The fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism and become a fearless mother is to give up the idea of doing it perfectly – indeed to embrace uncertainty and imperfection.’ – Arianna Huffington
‘I don’t want to call myself a perfectionist, because perfection is imperfection.’ – Ne-Yo
‘As a real person, he wouldn’t last a minute, would he? But drama is about imperfection. And we’ve moved away from the aspirational hero. We got tired of it, it was dull. If I was House’s friend, I would hate it. How he so resolutely refuses to be happy or take the kind-hearted road. But we don’t always like morally good people, do we?’ – Hugh Laurie
‘At some point, I’m just of the mind that no art is perfect, and it shouldn’t be perfect. I think it’s beautiful in its imperfection. You could tweak something forever, but you have to let it go and trust it.’ – Colman Domingo
‘I can deal with imperfection, but I can’t deal with people who lie to themselves and lie to the world to make the world feel better.’ – Bibi Bourelly
‘A poor self-image is the magnifying glass that can transform a trivial mistake or an imperfection into an overwhelming symbol of personal defeat.’ – David D. Burns
‘Monsters are the patron saints of imperfection.’ – Guillermo del Toro
‘I don’t love Photoshop; I like imperfection. It doesn’t mean ugly. I love a girl with a gap between her teeth, versus perfect white veneers. Perfection is just… boring. Perfect is what’s natural or real; that is beauty.’ – Marc Jacobs
‘As we lay hold upon the truth of God, its influence must affect us. It must elevate us. It must remove from us every imperfection.’ – Ellen G. White
‘The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.’ – Ben Okri
‘I like imperfection.’ – John Waite
‘I like any film where the female characters are complex and have a functioning imperfection.’ – Jenny Slate
‘My mother was a high-strung perfectionist. She would check my homework for the slightest imperfection and demand that it be redone if she detected any flaws, which she invariably did. My father, in contrast, was easy going and affable and delighted in helping me with any project.’ – Robert Lefkowitz
”Solutionism’ for me is, above all, an unthinking pursuit of perfection – by means of technology – without coming to grips with the fact that imperfection is an essential feature of liberal democracy.’ – Evgeny Morozov
‘On the contrary, I’m a strong believer in the necessity of imperfection coming into the film.’ – Walter Salles
‘The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.’ – Oliver Ellsworth
‘I feel like the live record thing is something that I’ve been getting used to as the years go by and with this being my second one, I’m continuing to learn what works and what doesn’t work. A live record is an example of that authenticity and that realness that you find in imperfection and you can hear that in this record.’ – Josh Turner
‘Therefore it does not help to sneer at the imperfection of today’s reality or to preach absolutes as a daily agenda.’ – Gustav Heinemann
‘Imperfection clings to a person, and if they wait till they are brushed off entirely, they would spin for ever on their axis, advancing nowhere.’ – Thomas Carlyle
‘All imperfection is easier to tolerate if served up in small doses.’ – Wislawa Szymborska
‘You’ll remember Dr. Rice said that several times: It was not a warning about the place and the method and the time – it was a general warning. And that points out the imperfection, if you would, of our intelligence.’ – Lee H. Hamilton
‘Both our senses and our passions are a supply to the imperfection of our nature; thus they show that we are such sort of creatures as to stand in need of those helps which higher orders of creatures do not.’ – Joseph Butler
‘God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truth.’ – William Ellery Channing
‘The flaw in, say, austerity, is that its success is predicated on the relative exactitude of math rather than the shifting, liquid imperfection of people’s lives.’ – Steven Weber
‘Evil is only imperfection, that which is not complete, which is becoming, but has not yet found its end.’ – Annie Besant
‘Every form, not being the whole, must, of necessity, be imperfect; less than the whole, it cannot be identical with the whole, and being less than the whole and, therefore, imperfect by itself, it shows imperfection as evil, and only the totality of a universe can mirror the image of God.’ – Annie Besant
‘There’s always room out there for the hand-drawn image. I personally like the imperfection of hand drawing as opposed to the slick look of computer animation. But you can do good stuff either way. The Pixar movies are amazing in what they do, but there’s plenty of independent animators who are doing really amazing things as well.’ – Matt Groening
‘With ‘Girls’… I feel like there’s an impulse to try to make it look better or neater or more perfect, and when I watch theater, television, movies, it’s always the imperfection I’m always more attracted to.’ – Adam Driver
‘Klutziness is endearing. I like imperfection.’ – Elizabeth Banks
‘A conservative vision to tech issues assumes the imperfection of mankind and a preference for markets – not politics – to drive outcomes.’ – Marsha Blackburn
‘If you ask people what attracted them to the person they love, they never tell you of some perfect feature that focused them on sheer surfaces but rather an imperfection that allowed them to see into their uncharted depths.’ – Eugene Kennedy
‘Catholicism actually resembles a family that survives because even as it aspires to holiness, it understands and can live with sin and imperfection.’ – Eugene Kennedy
‘I think even a hero is someone who has sort of the flaw or imperfection of character. I remember Alice Walker saying that once – she’d written a novel about a civil rights hero, and it was someone who had this flaw, this central flaw.’ – Hector Tobar
‘The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.’ – Shaun Tan
‘Mothers subject their daughters to a level of scrutiny people usually reserve for themselves. A mother’s gaze is like a magnifying glass held between the sun’s rays and kindling. It concentrates the rays of imperfection on her daughter’s yearning for approval. The result can be a conflagration – whoosh.’ – Deborah Tannen
‘Being a parent is such a difficult business; you don’t always get things right. And also, you don’t want to be a perfect parent… You need people to be human, and part of it is imperfection.’ – Kelly Macdonald
‘Growing up, I was listening to a ton of Motown music, Otis Redding, Aretha, and then there was the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin. These were all people that I felt as though they truly felt every single lyric they said, and they weren’t afraid of imperfection.’ – Bishop Briggs
‘For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population. We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection, and we’ve got to do it now. We cannot wait for them to learn how to be brave like I did when I was 33 years old.’ – Reshma Saujani
‘We see acne and spots as an imperfection and I’ve gone to great lengths to cover it up with lots of foundation. And everyone thinks ‘Toff’s perfect’ but I mask my imperfections.’ – Georgia Toffolo
‘Mississippi is an imperfect state, and I can predict with certainty that I will reflect that imperfection. Mississippians also strive for excellence, and I swear to reflect that as well.’ – Tate Reeves
‘That concerns me, that we’re reaching out for perfection, when country music has always been about imperfection.’ – Lorrie Morgan
‘With crostata, the beauty is in the imperfection.’ – Antonia Lofaso