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The desire for perfection is the worst disease that ever afflicted the human mind.
Marquis Louis Fontanes (1757-1821) to Napoleon 1 in 1804.
Perfection does not exist. To understand it is the triumph of human intelligence; the desire to possess it is the most dangerous kind of madness.
Pre-analytic opinions on perfectionism, as recorded by poets, philosophers and “sages,” approach the problem with scorn or irony. The consensus seems to be that perfection does not exist; people who try to approach perfection are either naive innocents or dangerous fanatics. Musset, in the lines quoted above, spoke of “madness”; Fontanes of “disease.” Less extreme judgments stress the hopelessness of achieving perfection, as in Alexander Pope's couplet:
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to seeThinks what ne'er was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
This is merely a repetition of Shakespeare's theme in THE RAPE OF LUCRECE:
No perfection is so absoluteThat some impurity does not pollute.
In SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER, Oliver Goldsmith spoke ironically of “the very pink of perfection” but there are also some opinions on record which either approve the impossible, or at least defends it as a “seed” cherished within the “central