Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Perfection is a stick with which to beat the possible.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Perfection can hinder creativity and the acceptance of what is achievable.
In this quote, Rebecca Solnit suggests that striving for perfection often prevents us from recognizing and valuing the possible achievements and outcomes available to us. It implies that an unattainable ideal can lead to dissatisfaction and anxiety, overshadowing the beauty and worth of imperfection and real progress.
Themes
PerfectionPotentialImperfectionCreativityAchievement
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about embracing our flaws, this quote can emphasize the importance of progress over perfection.
More from Rebecca Solnit
All quotes βI still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small.
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We have a real role in how our own collective lives, our nation, and our world and society turn out. Seizing those opportunities is important, and disasters are sometimes one of those opportunities.
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If sorrow and beauty are all tied up together, then perhaps maturity brings with it not what Nabhan calls abstraction, but an aesthetic sense that partially redeems the losses time brings and finds beauty in the faraway.
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The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca SolnitRead
Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller's, only to know that one might. A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.
Rebecca SolnitRead
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