Mikhail Baryshnikov Quotes

Strive for excellence, not perfection.

People can live up to high standards, but they can't live up to perfection.

I'm the type of person who is always going to be somewhat dissatisfied with myself. I'm never going to be smart enough. I'm never going to be a good enough father and husband. I'm never going to be a good enough actor for myself. I just never will be, and I have to get comfortable with waking up every day and trying to move some little increment closer to the person I have always dreamed of being. This is the journey.

You will come closer and closer to perfection, but you will never be perfect. Perfection is not the way of existence. Growth is the way.

Perfect is unattainable. Better is possible.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am today. And that's how I look at my life. I will be a better golfer, I will be a better person, I will be a better father, I will be a better husband, I will be a better friend. That's the beauty of tomorrow.

Take perfection and throw it out the window. There's always something you can make better or do differently - strive to IMPROVE, not attain the impossible.

Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.

I always say I've given 24 insufficient performances and I'm looking forward to the time in my life when I'll do something that I think is good. There's always stuff you can do better, stuff that maybe you didn't uncover enough. But if you do something that you truly believe is perfect, then that's got to be the last movie you do.

I'll need my whole lifetime to polish my craft.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

Looking for perfection is the only way to motivate yourself.

There's no one of us that's perfect; there's no one of us that can't do just a little better.

Most good work is a combination of parts you love and parts you could do better. My constant mantra is, 'Next time, next time, next time.'

It is our duty to try to be perfect, … to improve each day, and look upon our course last week and do things better this week; do things better today than we did them yesterday

No one is perfect. I know there is stuff that I need to work on, and not just one thing, but my game overall. Everything can get better.

A man must be strong enough to mold the peculiarity of his imperfections into the perfection of his peculiarities.

I try to give myself permission to be a work-in-progress and not have everything figured out at once. It's more manageable and takes some of the pressure off of feeling like I have to have everything right all the time.

I think that not being perfect has given me the freedom to keep getting better.

I tried always to do better: saw always a little further. I tried to stretch myself.

Well I'm always working on constantly everything. I never take the approach that I'm doing as well as I possibly can... I always think there's more and I think if you don't have that, you are not driven to be better.

Doing your best is more important than being the best.

No matter what I do on the baseball field, no matter how hard I try to be a good player, no matter how hard I try to be a good father or a good husband, I can never do enough. I can never be perfect in this world. But God's there to tell me that it's not what you do, it's whom you believe in and it's Him loving me.