Excellence Quote by Richard Sennett

“To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.” quote by Richard Sennett — Download Open image

““To the absolutist in every craftsman, each imperfection is a failure; to the practitioner, obsession with perfection seems a perception for failure.””

Richard Sennett

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Excellence Failure

More by Richard Sennett

“[There are] code words used today to measure the 'authenticity' of relationships or other persons. We speak of whether we can personally 'relate' to events or other persons, and whether in the relationship itself people are 'open' to one another. The first is a cover word for measuring the other in terms of a mirror of self-concern, and the second…

Richard Sennett

“Institutional changes, instead of following the path of a guided arrow, head in different and often conflicting directions: a profitable operating unit is suddenly sold, for example, yet a few years later the parent company tries to get back into the business in which it knew how to make money before it sought to reinvent itself. Such twists have prompted…

Richard Sennett

“The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood as the evils of impersonality, alienation, and coldness. The sum of these three is an ideology…

Richard Sennett

“But still he keeps working with a will; that's the craftsman in him.”

Richard Sennett

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“The top managers are defensive about these departures; they point to how safe, attractive, and up-to-date the workplace is. Rodney Everts is less defensive but equally perplexed. “When somebody tells me there’s no future here, I ask what they want. They don’t know; they tell me you shouldn’t be stuck in one place.” Fortunately, the job market in Boston for…

Richard Sennett

“Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.”

Richard Sennett

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Authority is itself inherently an act of imagination.

Richard Sennett

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Tocqueville saw the brute repression of deviants as a necessity if men were to keep convincing themselves of their collective dignity through their collective…

Richard Sennett

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Our modern economy privileges pure profit, momentary transactions and rapid fluidity. Part of craft’s anchoring role is that it helps to objectify experience and…

Richard Sennett

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Like the Roman town grid, the New York plan was laid down on largely empty land, a city designed in advance of being inhabited;…

Richard Sennett

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Issac Stern rule: the better your technique, the more impossible your standards.

Richard Sennett

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“At the end of the fifteenth century, the poet Thomas Hoccleve declared in The Regiment of Princes, “Allas, wher ys this worldes stabylnesse?”—a lament…

Richard Sennett

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Imperfections are what make you perfect.

Nia Tellé

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The pursuit of perfection is frustrating and a waste of time, because nothing is ever perfect. The pursuit of excellence is commendable and worthwhile.…

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“But young men have not only this frivolous ambition of being thought masters of execution, inciting them on the one hand, but also their natural sloth tempting them on the other. They are terrified at the prospect before them, of the toil required to attain exactness. The impetuosity of youth is disgusted at the slow approaches of a regular siege,…

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Many humanists have argued that happiness involves a combination of hedonism and creative moral development; that an exuberant life fuses excellence and enjoyment, meaning…

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