Human Perfection Quotes

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection. ~ Richard Rohr

The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics. ~ Maimonides

To love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. ~ John Locke

Every human perfection is linked to an error which it threatens to turn into ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

And I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than scenery. Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal for that? The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we are. To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Dignity is the only one thing I have chosen over rules and benefits of slavery. I am not perfect because I chose to be myself; a human and this is the simplest form of dignity. ~ Rola Mahmoud

Who wants to be a goddess when we can be human? Perfection is a flaw disguised as control. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be. Once for all; I love her none the less because I knew it, and it had no more influence in restraining me, than if I had devoutly believed her to be human perfection. ~ Charles Dickens

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.
Technical perfection strives towards the calculable, human perfection towards the incalculable. Perfect mechanisms - around which, therefore, stands an uncanny but fascinating halo of brilliance - evoke both fear and Titanic pride which will be humbled not by insight but only by catastrophe.
The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger. ~ Ernst Junger

Of course, some will say the goal [of abolition] is a utopian dream of human perfection. We needn't worry. There will be more than enough sins left for everyone to commit after we have taken nuclear bombs away from ourselves. ~ Jonathan Schell

This human body is the greatest body in the universe, and a human being the greatest being. Man is higher than all animals, than all angels; none is greater than man. Even the Devas (gods) will have to come down again and attain to salvation through a human body. Man alone attains to perfection, not even the Devas. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Error is human,perfection is divine!You are not God! Your mistake is normal.So forgive yourself. ~ Paul Gitwaza

All art is in the last analysis an endeavor to condense as out of the flying vapor of the world an image of human perfection, and for its own and not for the art's sake. ~ William Butler Yeats

Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in the world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody. ~ Anthony Collins

When the dogma of the Assumption was defined a friend of mine, a very intelligent Mohammedan, congratulated me on the gesture which the Holy Father had made; a gesture (said he) against materialism. And I think he was right. When our Lord took his blessed Mother, soul and body, into heaven, he did honour to the poor clay of which our human bodies are fashioned. It was the first step towards reconciling all things in heaven and earth to his eternal Father, towards making all things new. "The whole of nature", St Paul tells us, "groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery." That transformation of our material bodies to which we look forward one day has been accomplished - we know it now for certain-in her.

When the Son of God came to earth, he came to turn our hearts away from earth, Godwards. And as the traveller, shading his eyes while he contemplates some long vista of scenery, searches about for a human figure that will give him the scale of those distant surroundings, so we, with dazzled eyes looking Godwards, identify and welcome one purely human figure close to his throne. One ship has rounded the headland, one destiny is achieved, one human perfection exists. And as we watch it, we see God clearer, see God greater, through this ~ Ronald Knox

Anger tried to boil up higher inside her. She closed her eyes, praying for God's peace. Human wrath was against the will of God and only gave Satan influence over a soul. Honor must leave these evil men to God's justice. ~ Lyn Cote

For you I'll always be Alison who slept around. That Australian girl who had an abortion. The human boomerang. Throw her away and she'll always come back for another weekend of cheap knock. ~ John Fowles

That beautiful girl, she was a universe, bearer of these words that rang like gongs, that tumbled like flutes made of human bones. ~ Janet Fitch

Stories are living and dynamic. Stories exist to be exchanged. They are the currency of Human Growth. ~ Jean Houston

Many's very human habit of trusting in himself is generally the last great obstacle blocking his pathway to victory in Christian experience. ~ A.W. Tozer

Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you're good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant S.O.B. like me, what comes naturally, you don't see as a special skill. It's just you. It's what you've always done. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

I'm sorry about today."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"I was bored and lonely."
"Some would call that the human condition. ~ Michael Nava

All of us have failed to match our dream of perfection. I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible. If I could write all my work again, I'm convinced I could do it better. This is the healthiest condition for an artist. That's why he keeps working, trying again: he believes each time that this time he will do it, bring it off. Of course he won't. ~ William Faulkner

You have to be realistic in the use of blood in the movies. There is a little bit more than a gallon in a human being. If you have a few thousand people, that makes a lot of blood. I'm very realistic in my use of blood. ~ Alexandre Aja

Remember that the animals and plants have no M.P. they can write to; they can't perform sit-down strikes or, indeed, strikes of any sort; they have nobody to speak for them except us, the human beings who share the world with them but do not own it. ~ Gerald Durrell

When the human being says:
'It is not true ... '
He may mean:
'I don't know about it, so I think it is untrue.'
Or:
'I don't like it. ~ Idries Shah

The human animal is a beast that dies but the fact that he's dying don't give him pity for others. ~ Tennessee Williams

A smile appears on the faces of most archaic figures, a happiness of expression seeming to transcend that of human beings. ~ Francis Henry Taylor

An interesting fiction ... however paradoxical the assertion may appear ... addresses our love of truth- not the mere love of facts expressed by true names and dates, but the love of that higher truth, the truth of nature and principals, which is a primitive law of the human mind. ~ James Fenimore Cooper

Thucydides had grasped that vital historical insight that groups of people behave differently and have different motivations from individual human beings, and that they often behave far more discreditably than individuals. He ~ Diarmaid MacCulloch

Computers can do better than ever what needn't be done at all. Making sense is still a human monopoly. ~ Marshall McLuhan

No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed to almost vanish when seen edge on. There was a faint blue shimmer to the thing and a ghost light that played around its edges, and somehow Will knew that it was sharper than any razor. ~ George R R Martin

Darwinism undermined traditional morality and the value of human life. Then, evolutionary progress became the new moral imperative. This aided the advance of eugenics, which was overtly founded on Darwinian principles. Some eugenicists began advocating euthanasia and infanticide for the disabled. On a parallel track, some prominent Darwinists argued that human racial competition and war is part of the Darwinian struggle for existence. Hitler imbibed these social Darwinist ideas, blended in virulent anti-Semitism, and
there you have it: Holocaust ~ Richard Weikart

How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? ~ John Maynard Keynes

With such global events looming over us like mountains, nay, like entire mountain ranges, it may seem incongruous and inappropriate to recall that the primary key to our being or non-being resides in each individual human heart, in the heart's preference for specific good or evil. Yet this remains true even today, and it is, in fact, the most reliable key we have. The social theories that promised so much have demonstrated their bankruptcy, leaving us at a dead end. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

You have a chance to save lives! If you don't take it, you may regret it! ~ Widad Akreyi

When people don't know what's going on, it's human nature for them to imagine a version that's ten times worse than the truth! ~ Kenneth H. Blanchard

The moral perfections of the Deity, the more attentively, we consider, the more perfectly still shall we know them. ~ Joseph Addison

I feel that every human being is beautiful, and I think that each one of us needs to realize how beautiful we really are, I struggle with that everyday. ~ Randy Fenoli

Folklore is the boiled-down juice, or pot-likker, of human living. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation. ~ Nicole Krauss

A man wasn't equal to an animal, not one particle of him. Human life was stinking corrupt, and meanwhile there were beautiful creatures who lived with delicacy on the earth without doing anyone harm. "We should be dying." the judge almost wept. ~ Kiran Desai

As connected as we are with technology, it's also removed us from having to have human connection, made it more convenient to not be intimate. ~ Sandra Bullock

I am a plain ordinary human in the service of the humans - service is my oxygen, service is my water, service is my bread and service is my butter. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I feel certain that Conservatism is through unless Conservatives can demonstrate and communicate the difference between being concerned with [the unemployed, the sick without medical care, human welfare, etc.] and believing that the federal government is the proper agent for their solution. ~ Barry M. Goldwater

Teach him to worry about whether he wants to be free, and he will not free himself. Again, it may be said that this instance is remote or extreme. But, again, it is exactly true of the men in the streets around us. It is true that the negro slave, being a debased barbarian, will probably have either a human affection of loyalty, or a human affection for liberty. But the man we see every day
the worker in Mr. Gradgrind's factory, the little clerk in Mr. Gradgrind's office
he is too mentally worried to believe in freedom. ~ G.K. Chesterton

It was exciting and intellectually gratifying to speculate on what might lie waiting in the black gulfs when one was behind the business end of a telescope, quite another to do so isolated on an unpleasant little speck of a world such as this, confronted by a ship of non-human manufacture that uncomfortably resembled a growth instead of a familiar device for manipulating and overcoming the neat laws of physics. ~ Alan Dean Foster