I describe imperfect characters. Every character in this book will be found to be more or less imperfect, my pen refusing to draw anything in the model line.

-Bronte«  , Charlotte
  Shirley, ch.5.

To fight for the right, to abhor the imperfect, the unjust, or the mean, to swerve neither to the right hand nor the left, to care nothing for flattery or applause or odium or abuseöit is so easy to have any of them in Indiaönever to let your enthusiasm be soured or your courage grow dim but to remember that the Almighty has placed your hand on the greatest of his ploughs, in whose furrow the nations of the future are germinating and taking shape, to drive the blade a little forward in your time and to feel that somewhere among those millions you have left, a little justice, or happiness or prosperity, a sense of manliness or moral dignity, a springof patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenmentora stirringofduty whereit did not exist beforeöthat is enough, that is the Englishman's justification in India.

-Curzon (of Kedleston), Lord George Nathaniel
  Farewell speech on departing from Bombay as Viceroy of India.

How imperfect is all our knowledge!

-Donne,John
  Sermon preached at the funeral of Sir  William Cockayne, 12 Dec.

I could never be a complete scholar or a complete housewife ora completewriter: Imustcombinea little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all.

-Plath, Sylvia
  Letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, 25 Feb. Collected in Aurelia Schober Plath (ed) Letters Home by Sylvia Plath (1949).

   The moral life of man forms part of the subject matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium.

-Wilde, Oscar Fingal O'FlahertieWills
The Picture of Dorian Gray, preface.