Perfection

Famous quotes containing the word perfection:

“You have waited, you always wait, you dumb, beautiful ministers,
We receive you with free sense at last, and are insatiate
hence-forward,
Not you any more shall be able to foil us, or withhold yourselves
from us,
We use you, and do not cast you aside—we plant you permanently within us,
We fathom you not—we love you—there is perfection in you also,
You furnish your parts, toward eternity,
Great or small, you furnish your parts toward the soul.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

“What journeyings on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the gospel to these minks and muskrats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there “were praying Indians,” and, as the General Court wrote to Cromwell, the “work is brought to this perfection that some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“The man who, from the beginning of his life, has been bathed at length in the soft atmosphere of a woman, in the smell of her hands, of her bosom, of her knees, of her hair, of her supple and floating clothes, ... has contracted from this contact a tender skin and a distinct accent, a kind of androgyny without which the harshest and most masculine genius remains, as far as perfection in art is concerned, an incomplete being.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)