Best 123 quotes in «perfectionism quotes» category

Pregnancy had seemed a reasonable excuse for letting her metal-smithing tools languish, but that accounted for only eighteen months of the last twenty-six years. Motherhood wasn't the real problem, though it took him a long time to figure out what was. She needed resistance, the very quality that metal most demonstrably offered up. Suddenly Glynis had no difficulty to overcome, no hard artisan's life with galleries filching half the too-small price of a mokume brooch that had taken three weeks to forge. No, her husband made a good living, and if she slept late and dawdled the afternoon away reading Lustre, American Craft Magazine and Lapidary Journal, the phone bill would still get paid. For that matter, she needed need itself. She could overcome her anguish about embarking on an object that, once completed, might not meet her exacting standards only if she had no choice. In this sense, his helping had hurt her. By providing the financial cushion that should have facilitated making all the metal whathaveyou she liked, he had ruined her life. Wrapped in a slackening bow, ease was a poisonous present.

Professionalism is a key to Perfectionism…

Productivity is about looking forward. Looking back too much, or trying to be too much of a perfectionist, can destroy that productivity. So keep going. Keep creating. Keep building.

Progress is much more better than perfect.

Q: When is the perfect time? A: Who can say, but probably somewhere between haste and delay - and it's usually most wise to start today.

Relax your expectations, in fact, purposely lower them so low that you feel excitedly naughty about showing up to perform your work with reckless abandon. If that’s hard, open to doing it that way just 5%. Deliberately perform below your skill-level to get started and to see what ideas fall out of a relaxed approach. And in that choice you will create an world of joy within yourself, you’ll truly be an artist of being alive.

...some people become hypercritical when stressed. Then again, he hadn't been stressed last week. She giggled, remembering how he'd instructed her on the proper way to fold hand towels. Talk about nitpicky. Perhaps this would be a good time to call it quits.

Self-love is not the process of ignoring things, paying attention to fewer flaws or forcing yourself to look away from the parts of you that you perceive as ugly or unwanted. Self-love is the process of expanding your awareness, of seeing those flaws and imperfections alongside the incredible potential of the universe flowing within you, alongside the eternal truth of life flowing within your veins in each second, alongside the flickers of creativity and opportunity present within each moment of your existence. Like this, the imperfections persist, but only as lovable quirks, like a bad doorknob on the front door of a cottage in paradise, like a few thorns on a beautiful rose, like a cloud in a sunset. Like this, what was once unwanted becomes essential, memorable, humbling.

Seeking for perfection is like seeking for mental health without a definition of what it is. But if psychology and psychiatry are as lost as the people they consistently evaluate, and people are as imperfect as the imperfection they see in others, then I have to conclude that it is as wise to accept judgment as it is to judge first the ones who judge us. But it is also as wise as it is foolish to do so; for it is like seeking for a definition that can’t entirely define us. Because if one answer can explain a thousand questions, a billion questions would never amount to the importance of an answer, which the simpler it is, the more questions it answers. And in that sense, I must say, we are imperfectly perfect.

The most successful are not the most perfect, but the imperfect who dare to believe that they can despite the damning verdict.

The desire for perfection often leads to the awakening of the Procrasdemon. Allowing yourself to make mistakes is the single most effective way to get rid of it.

The inescapable contrariety between 'being a perfectionist' and 'being a procrastinator' is never actually perceived by someone who procrastinates.

The magic elixir to perfectionism is to practice gratitude.

The myth of self-sufficiency demands optimism without end, downplays life’s challenges, and shames us when, inevitably, we fall short.

The most dangerous way we sabotage ourselves is by waiting for the perfect moment to begin. Nothing works perfectly the first time, or the first fifty times. Everything has a learning curve. The beginning is just that - a beginning. Surrender your desire to do it flawlessly on the first try. It's not possible. Learn to learn. Learn to fail. Learn to learn from failing. And begin today. Begin now. Stop waiting.

The notion of the perfect time is more than myth. It's the ultimate self-delusion.

The onslaught of scruples is a problem well attested in the spiritual life, especially among the young, where religious observances must be done perfectly to achieve a certain result.

There are too many people who love me, and accept me, and never try and change me, and who don’t condemn me in the slightest, for me to waste even one moment of my life anymore worrying about what other people will think.

The problem was that I carried around with me a tendency to feel that other people’s respect for me would vanish if what I did was second rate. And while I accept that this “perfectionism” is likely to stimulate the production of better work, it doesn’t, unfortunately, go hand in hand with a relaxed and happy attitude to life.

There is no way to genuinely, powerfully, truly love yourself while crafting a mask of perfection. I know, you know, we all know—it's hard to let your pimples and your flaws be seen. It's hard to stumble and bumble. It's hard to not know the right things to do or say. It's hard to not look like TV. Sometimes, it's really hard for me to be the awkward mess that I am when I'm authentic, instead of having runway authenticity—all natural, but flawless. But every time I allow that to be okay, not just around myself but around others—I affirm something to myself. I affirm, to myself more than anyone else, that I am lovable and acceptable unconditionally. I affirm that it's okay to take on and take in all the flavours and hues of human experience, and not just the ones that are acceptable in this culture, in this time, in this place. And that kind of acceptance, that kind of love—that's the kind of love that creates miracles. That's the kind of love I really need. That's the kind of love that makes approval taste like cardboard.

There is no greater suffering than constantly measuring yourself and coming up short, except perhaps the realization that your suffering is hurting others. But where do we learn these things? Because, really, they are learned. We don't come crying out of the womb because of our birth weight or because we have no money in this brand new world. We learn to measure and we learn to attach our self-worth to those measurements. These patterns we're stuck in aren't just painful for us, they're also distracting us. Every day, the gap between rich and poor grows while the people of developed societies do nothing, because we are too busy worrying about looking good. We're distracted, but not because we've chosen to be. Being distracted by our illusory inadequacy keeps us from changing the world. And believe me, we all have the power to change the world. If we only make the time. If we only free some head space. If you can't learn to love yourself for yourself (and how could you with such a paradoxical motivation?)... then do it for us. Do it for the world. We need you. We need your mind. We need your attention. We need your thoughts. Change your focus, and you will (not can, but will) change the world. You already matter. You just have to realize it for yourself.

There is no way to genuinely, powerfully, truly love yourself while crafting a mask of perfection.

There was a man who was so confident in himself, that he was completely blind to his partner's needs and wants. He believed he was perfect for this person, but he was not. If only he knew perfection does not exist. And this is what really turned his partner away from him. The End.

There’s no need to sharpen your pencils any more. Even the dull ones can make a mark.

There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well.The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and everyday confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.

The unfolding over time of a great idea is like the growth of a fractal crystal, allowing details and refinements to multiply endlessly — but only in ever-increasing scale.

The wholesome pursuit of excellence feels quite different from perfectionism.

To be a learner, you've got to be willing to be a fool.

This absurd over-estimate of the importance of the moment of dying is the direct consequence of the rejection of the Bible doctrine of Perseverance and the substitution for it of a doctrine of Perfection as the meaning of Christ being our Saviour to the uttermost.

To be courageous, we must be willing to surrender our perfectionism, if only for a moment. If my self-worth is attached to being flawless, why would I ever try to learn anything new? After all, learning requires mistakes.

Very strange clay this, passive in the potter’s hands, to which the potter can do nothing unless it lets him!

We're going to have to bust down the door on the myth of perfectionism. We're going to have to call it what it really is: fear.

There's no saint without a taint

We don’t need to be perfect to do good deeds in the world, but we need to be sincere in our efforts.

We freeze up because we expect a certain result or because we want things to be perfect.

When people undermine your values, they've strong reasons. For example, they mistaken your passion for excellence as perfectionism...

--what's really unique about maternal anxiety today is our belief that if something goes wrong with or for our children, it's a reflection on us as mothers. Because we believe we should be able to control life so perfectly that we can keep bad things from happening.

We seem to feel as though the life our children have -- that we have built for them -- is just a delicate house of cards, held together by the most intricate balancing of all its carefully selected components, and that the slightest shock, the slightest jar to all our perfect orchestration, will bring the whole edifice crashing down.

When shame is met with compassion and not received as confirmation of our guilt, we can begin to see how slant a lens it has had us looking through. That awareness lets us step back far enough to see that if we can let it go, we will see ourselves as clean where we once thought we were dirty. We will remember our innocence. We will see how our shame supported a system in which the perpetrators were protected and we bore the brunt of their offense — first in its actuality, then again in carrying their shame for it. If the method we chose to try to beat out shame was perfectionism, we can relax now, shake the burden off our shoulders, and give ourselves a chance to loosen up and make some errors. Hallelujah! Our freedom will not come from tireless effort and getting it all exactly right.

Worst thing about being a perfectionist.. Everything you do might look amazing in someone else eyes but in your heart never truly satisfied.

When we relate to ourselves with loving kindness, perfectionism naturally drops away.

You can waste a perfectly good life trying to meet the standards of someone who thinks you’re not good enough because they can’t understand who you are.

You know, the whole thing about perfectionism. The perfectionism is very dangerous. Because of course if your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything. Because doing anything results in...it's actually kind of tragic because you sacrifice how gorgeous and perfect it is in your head for what it really is. And there were a couple of years where I really struggled with that.

With some gratitude, I realized that my awareness was now stronger than my neurosis. This did not mean that things would never go to pieces, only that I did not have to fall apart when they did. In fact, my own ability to go to pieces was protecting me in this situation. I did not have to let my identity as an efficient and together person imprison me.

Your darkest moments are not meant to be swept under the carpet, hidden from the world in the silent pursuit of perfection. The darkness you've overcome is your ticket into leadership. It's what you're meant to light up in the world.

Perfectionism is a dangerous state of mind in an imperfect world.

I took everything really seriously and was overly sensitive about things, and I think that's rooted in perfectionism.

Perfectionism is a perpetual flight into an illusory future that cannot be attained.

Perfectionism is the enemy of profitability.

Perfectionism is the mother of procrastination.