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      "text": "Human perfection and technical perfection are incompatible. If we strive for one, we must sacrifice the other: there is, in any case, a parting of the ways. Whoever realises this will do cleaner work one way or the other.",
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      "text": "You could not arrive at excellence by the average of these people. Excellence was an individual quest, not a group effort.",
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      "text": "If she were more perfect, she would be less interesting.",
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      "text": "One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.",
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      "text": "It's like a lot of things, said the smith. Do the least part of it wrong and ye'd just as well to do it all wrong. (p.71)",
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      "text": "I’m not quite twenty, but, thanks to you, I’ve learned something that many women these days never learn: Prince Charming really is a toad. And the Beautiful Princess has halitosis. The bottom line is that (a) people are never perfect, but love can be, (b) that is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and (c) doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn’t that be the way to make love stay?",
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      "text": "I should esteem it the extreme of imprudence to prolong the precarious state of our national affairs, and to expose the Union to the jeopardy of successive experiments, in the chimerical pursuit of a perfect plan. I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed.",
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      "text": "He had never before seen a woman’s lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.",
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      "text": "Routine has nothing to do with repetition. To become really good at anything, you have to practice and repeat, practice and repeat, until the technique becomes intuitive.",
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      "slug": "i-looked-for",
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      "text": "I looked for perfection, and I found something better.",
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      "slug": "that-progress-is-both",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/david-deutsch/the-beginning-of-infinity/that-progress-is-both",
      "text": "That progress is both possible and desirable is perhaps the quintessential idea of the Enlightenment. It motivates all traditions of criticism, as well as the principle of seeking good explanations. But it can be interpreted in two almost opposite ways, both of which, confusingly, are known as ‘perfectibility’. One is that humans, or human societies, are capable of attaining a state of supposed perfection – such as the Buddhist or Hindu ‘nirvana’, or various political utopias. The other is that every attainable state can be indefinitely improved. Fallibilism rules out that first position in favour of the second.",
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        "title": "The Beginning of Infinity",
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      "slug": "probably-the-closest",
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      "text": "Probably the closest things to perfection are the huge absolutely empty holes that astronomers have recently discovered in space. If there's nothing there, how can anything go wrong?",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Richard Brautigan",
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      "slug": "what-is-all",
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      "text": "What is all that men have done and thought over thousands of years, compared with one moment of love. But in all Nature, too, it is what is nearest to perfection, what is most divinely beautiful! There all stairs lead from the threshold of life. From there we come, to there we go.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Friedrich Hölderlin",
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        "title": "Hyperion",
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      "slug": "he-saw-that",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jack-kerouac/the-town-and-the-city/he-saw-that",
      "text": "He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings — all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable labourious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Jack Kerouac",
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Jack_Kerouac#The_Town_and_the_City_(1950)",
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      "slug": "how-persistent-it-is-this",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/frank-herbert/god-emperor-of-dune/how-persistent-it-is-this",
      "text": "How persistent it is, this demand that our gods be perfect. The Greeks were much more reasonable about such things.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Frank Herbert",
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        "title": "God Emperor of Dune",
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      "slug": "everything-in-the",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/frank-herbert/dune/everything-in-the",
      "text": "Everything in the universe contains flaws, ourselves included. Even God does not attempt perfection in His creations. Only humankind has such foolish arrogance.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Frank Herbert",
        "slug": "frank-herbert",
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dune#Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad_(2002)",
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      "slug": "there-is-in-all",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/frank-herbert/dune/there-is-in-all",
      "text": "There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace - those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains it own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Frank Herbert",
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      "slug": "i-promise-nothing",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/herman-melville/moby-dick/i-promise-nothing",
      "text": "I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Herman Melville",
        "slug": "herman-melville",
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        "title": "Moby-Dick",
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      ],
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        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Moby-Dick#Cetology_(32)",
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      "text": "For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Herman Melville",
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      "text": "\"The hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê. \"Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.\"",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Robert M. Pirsig",
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        "title": "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/what-moves-the",
      "text": "\"What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,\" Kitto comments, \"is not a sense of duty as we understand it—duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate 'virtue' but is in Greek aretê, 'excellence' … we shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life.\" There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever.",
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      "slug": "nor-is-there",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/fyodor-dostoyevsky/the-idiot/nor-is-there",
      "text": "Nor is there any embarrassment in the fact that we're ridiculous, isn't it true? For it's actually so, we are ridiculous, light-minded, with bad habits, we're bored, we don't know how to look, how to understand, we're all like that, all, you, and I, and they! Now, you're not offended when I tell you to your face that you're ridiculous? And if so, aren't you material? You know, in my opinion it's sometimes even good to be ridiculous, if not better: we can the sooner forgive each other, the sooner humble ourselves; we can't understand everything at once, we can't start right out with perfection! To achieve perfection, one must first begin by not understanding many things! And if we understand too quickly, we may not understand well. This I tell you, you, who have already been able to understand. .. and not understand ... so much. I'm not afraid for you now.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Fyodor Dostoyevsky",
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        "title": "The Idiot",
        "slug": "the-idiot",
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      "topics": [
        {
          "name": "forgiveness",
          "slug": "forgiveness",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/forgiveness"
        },
        {
          "name": "perfection",
          "slug": "perfection",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/perfection"
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      "slug": "the-blessed-work",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-eliot/scenes-of-clerical-life/the-blessed-work",
      "text": "The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "George Eliot",
        "slug": "george-eliot",
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        "title": "Scenes of Clerical Life",
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        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-eliot/scenes-of-clerical-life"
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      "slug": "i-cannot-repeat",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile-or-on-education/i-cannot-repeat",
      "text": "I cannot repeat too often that I am not dealing with prodigies. Emile is no prodigy, neither is Sophy. He is a man and she is a woman; this is all they have to boast of. In the present confusion between the sexes it is almost a miracle to belong to one's own sex. Sophy is well born and she has a good disposition; she is very warm-hearted, and this warmth of heart sometimes makes her imagination run away with her. Her mind is keen rather than accurate, her temper is pleasant but variable, her person pleasing though nothing out of the common, her countenance bespeaks a soul and it speaks true; you may meet her with indifference, but you will not leave her without emotion. Others possess good qualities which she lacks; others possess her good qualities in a higher degree, but in no one are these qualities better blended to form a happy disposition. She knows how to make the best of her very faults, and if she were more perfect she would be less pleasing.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Jean Jacques Rousseau",
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        "title": "Emile; or On Education",
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          "name": "character",
          "slug": "character",
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        {
          "name": "perfection",
          "slug": "perfection",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/perfection"
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      ],
      "source": {
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Emile,_or_On_Education#Book_V",
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          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:39:37"
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    {
      "id": "8494d6a0-43ae-46c0-9d5c-b4b5f9b979c0",
      "slug": "he-never-created",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/second-foundation/he-never-created",
      "text": "He never created a finished product. Finished products are for decadent minds.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": {
        "name": "Isaac Asimov",
        "slug": "isaac-asimov",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov"
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      "book": {
        "title": "Second Foundation",
        "slug": "second-foundation",
        "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/isaac-asimov/second-foundation"
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      "topics": [
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          "name": "creativity",
          "slug": "creativity",
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        },
        {
          "name": "perfection",
          "slug": "perfection",
          "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/perfection"
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      ],
      "source": {
        "name": "Wikiquote",
        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Isaac_Asimov#Second_Foundation_(1953)",
        "license": {
          "label": "CC BY-SA 4.0",
          "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"
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      "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:38:22"
    }
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