James Beattie Quotes

Nobody's perfect, and everybody plays the heel and the baby face at times in real life.

Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.

No one is all good or all bad, and there's many different ways to go about your life.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

I am a man of many flaws and contradictions.

If there's a theme to where I'm at in my life, it's that 'warts and all' is actually my superpower. Just like you, I'm messed up and I'm capable. I'm this and that.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

We are double-edged blades, and every time we whet our virtue the return stroke straps our vice. Where is the skillful swordsman who can give clean wounds, and not rip up his work with the other edge?

But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

In some situations I was difficult, in odd moments impossible, in rare moments loathsome, but at my best unapproachably great.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

Every human perfection is allied to a defect into which it threatens to pass, but it is also true that every defect is allied to a perfection.

I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

I am old enough to know only too well my good and bad qualities, which were often one in the same.

None so good that he has no faults, None so wicked that he is worth naught.

We are all like the bright moon, we still have our darker side.

I find that the best virtue I have has in it some tincture of vice.

There is no light without shadow, and no psychic wholeness without imperfection.

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair if they were not cherished by our own virtues.

No motive is pure. No one is good or bad-but a hearty mix of both. And sometimes life actually gives to you by taking away.

a person is never entirely holy or entirely sinful.