Many religious people think that it’s all a merit badge system—all achievement, accomplishment, performance, and perfection. The good people win and the bad people lose. Of course, once we cast anything as a win-lose scenario, the irony is that everybody loses. Why...
Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it's often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life...
Aim for success, not perfection. Never give up your right to be wrong, because then you will lose the ability to learn new things and move forward with your life. Remember that fear always lurks behind perfectionism.
I ask myself whether we are using sufficiently one of the doors that leads to God—the door named Beauty… One can find God through the door of truth, for truth also attracts us. But many of our contemporaries are little Pilates who ask: “What is truth?” and remain...
Composers know how to use harmony and melody like a net to catch beauty's colors and radiance. And when we like what we hear, we open our pores to take in more--just as we close them against what seems ugly or offensive. Isn't that why we remember so vividly the hours...
The principle of neighborly love encapsulates the balance between time and eternity which is vital to the practice of true hope. Since love is not, for an ideal human being, living in a state of abstract perfection but rather for someone in particular, someone...
The acceptance of the fact that Christian existence is based on and permeated with God’s forgiveness in Christ through the Holy Spirit strikes simultaneous deathblows to attitudes which can be described as musical legalism and musical lawlessness. Musical legalism can...
Perfect yourselves first of all in the small things so as to become capable of greater deeds. from The Way of Perfection
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaningless and empty life… It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as...
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men! A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else’s imagination, as if that were the only place in...