Imperfect Quotes
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A boat at midnight sent alone to drift upon the moonless sea, a lute, whose leading chord is gone, a wounded bird, that hath but one imperfect wing to soar upon, are like what I am, without thee.
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More Imperfect Quotes
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as " state " and " society " and " government " have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self - responsible individuals . He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt , responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self- failure .
robert a. heinlein— In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife or a complete writer: I must combine a little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.
Sylvia Plath— 1956 Letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, 25 Feb. Collected in Aurelia Schober Plath (ed) Letters Home by Sylvia Plath (1949).
At bottom, the court's opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people, who have recognized a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding, and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt. It is a strange time to repudiate that common sense. While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.
john paul stevens— Dissenting, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. ___ (2010)
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as "state" and "society" and "government" have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.
robert a. heinlein— In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
The fact that boys are allowed to exist at all is evidence of remarkable Christian forbearance among men – were it not for a mawkish humanitarianism, coupled with imperfect digestive powers, we should devour our young, as Nature intended.
ambrose bierce— Town Crier, column in the San Francisco News-Letter (c. 1870)
If God has made the world a perfect mechanism, He has at least conceded so much to our imperfect intellect that in order to predict little parts of it, we need not solve innumerable differential equations, but can use dice with fair success.
Max Born— "Einstein's Statistical Theories" in Albert Einstein : Philosopher-Scientist (1951) edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp, p. 176
I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.
charlotte brontë— Ch. 5: Hollow's Cottage
In return for this great gift that I could not repay in a thousand lifetimes, at least I can promise that, although I have frequently advanced wrong, or even stupid, arguments (in the light of later discoveries), at least I have never been lazy, and have never betrayed your trust by cutting corners or relying on superficial secondary sources. I have always based these essays upon original works in their original languages (with only two exceptions, when Fracastoro's elegant Latin verse and Beringer's foppish Latin pseudocomplexities eluded my imperfect knowledge of this previously universal scientific tongue).
stephen jay gould— Preface, p. 6
A rational anarchist believes that concepts such as " state " and "society" and " government " have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self - responsible individuals . He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame … as blame, guilt , responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world … aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self- failure .
robert a. heinlein— In The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966)
I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.
charlotte brontë— 1849 Shirley, ch.5.
How imperfect is all our knowledge!
john donne— 1626 Sermon preached at the funeral of Sir William Cockayne, 12 Dec.
Love, you shall perfect for me this child Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking: Within new limits now, arrange the world And square the circle: four walls and a ring.
— 1966 Death of a Naturalist,'Poem: For Marie'.
'Tis certain we have but very imperfect accounts of the manners and religion of these people; this part of the world being seldomvisited,but bymerchants, whomind little but their own affairs; or travellers, who make too short a stay to be able to report anything exactly of their own knowledge.
— c.1716 Of Turkey. Collected in Lord Wharncliffe (ed) The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1837).
Oligopoly is an imperfect monopoly. Like the despotism of the Dual Monarchy, it is saved only by its incompetence.
john kenneth galbraith— Chapter XVI, Section 2, p. 182
Foresight is an imperfect thing — all prevision in economics is imperfect.
john kenneth galbraith— Chapter XIX, The New Economics At High Noon, p. 269
We adore perfection because we can't have it; it would disgust us if we had it. Perfect is inhuman, because human is imperfect.
fernando pessoa— Original: Adoramos a perfeição, porque não a podemos ter; repugná-la-íamos, se a tivéssemos. O perfeito é o desumano, porque o humano é imperfeito.
— Ibid., p. 249
As Mr. Wallace justly observes, Hume 's apothegm, that "a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature," is imperfect; for in the first place it assumes that we know all the laws of nature; and, second, that an unusual phenomenon is a miracle.
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky— Chapter XII (Volume I)
How can we expect novelists to be moral, when their trade forces them to treat every end they meet as no more than an imperfect means to a novel?
Randall Jarrell— Chapter 1, p. 8
The evil into which these philosophers have fallen is greater than that from which they sought to escape, because they refuse to say that God neglects or forgets a thing, and yet they maintain that His knowledge is imperfect, that He is ignorant of what is going on here on earth, that He does not perceive it.
maimonides— Ch.16 (Part III)
As many truths as men. Ocassionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.
david mitchell— "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", p. 24 (Nook Edition)
Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.
anaïs nin— Feb. 15, 1936
Aristotle says the infinite is imperfect, unfinished, and therefore unthinkable; it is formless and confused. Only as objects are delimited and distinct do they have a nature.
— Morris Kline, Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times, Oxford University Press, 1972
My views are near to those of Spinoza : admiration for the beauty of and belief in the logical simplicity of the order and harmony which we can grasp humbly and only imperfectly. I believe that we have to content ourselves with our imperfect knowledge and understanding and treat values and moral obligations as a purely human problem the most important of all human problems.
Albert Einstein— In a letter to Murray W. Gross (26 April 1947), quoted in Einstein and Religion (1999).
Modern man no longer communicates with the madman ... There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in a dialogue, gives the separation as already enacted, and expels from the memory all those imperfect words, of no fixed syntax, spoken falteringly, in which the exchange between madness and reason was carried out. The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
Michel Foucault— Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, preface to the 1961 edition
Equity in its general sense is that quality in the transactions of mankind which accords with natural justice, or with honesty and right. . . . But in its juridical sense, that is to say, as administered by the Courts, equity embraces a jurisdiction much less wide than the principles of natural justice:;; for there are many matters of natural justice which the Courts have wholly unprovided for, partly from the difficulty of framing rules to meet them and partly from the doubtful policy of attempting to give a legal sanction to duties of so-called imperfect obligation, such as charity, justice and kindness.
— Snell, Eq. Part I., Ch. 1, p. 1. (The Dictionary of Legal Quotations (1904))
Our human laws are but the copies, more or less imperfect, of the eternal laws, so far as we can read them.
james anthony froude— James Anthony Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, Calvinism.
