Perfect Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Joseph Butler

George Ripley (transcendentalist)

Robert Louis Stevenson

Salmon P. Chase

A. E. Housman

Adelaide Anne Procter

George Boole

Home—that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings.

Lydia Maria Child

A good traveller is one who does not know where he is going to, and a perfect traveller does not know where he came from.

The heart of the jealous knows the best and most satisfying love, that of the other's bed, where the rival perfects the lover's imperfections.

Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.

R. G. Collingwood

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

Alberto Moravia

Softly the loud peal dies, In passing winds it drowns, But breathes, like perfect joys, Tender tones.

Frederick Tennyson

Like a French poem is life; being only perfect in structure when with the masculine rhymes mingled the feminine are.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Conscience is the perfect interpreter of life.

Our inclination is to show our Lord only what we feel comfortable with. But the more we dare to reveal our whole trembling self to him, the more we will be able to sense that his love, which is perfect love, casts out all our fears.

Even imperfection itself may have its ideal or perfect state.

Thomas De Quincey

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?

There's no such thing as perfect writing, just like there's no such thing as perfect despair.

Haruki Murakami

What are kings, when regiment is gone,
But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

Christopher Marlowe

The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe: the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time.

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.

Probability is expectation founded upon partial knowledge. A perfect acquaintance with all the circumstances affecting the occurrence of an event would change expectation into certainty, and leave neither room nor demand for a theory of probabilities.

We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.

Zelda Fitzgerald

Americans have been selling this view around the world: that progress comes from perfect protection of intellectual property. Notwithstanding the fact that the most innovative and progressive space we've seen — the Internet — has been the place where intellectual property has been least respected. You know, facts don't get in the way of this ideology.

Lawrence Lessig

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.

While the resurrection promises us a new and perfect life in the future, God loves us too much to leave us alone to contend with the pain, guilt and loneliness of our present life.

How beautiful is candor! All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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.

Alexander Hamilton

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.