"Perfection is immutable. But for things imperfect, change is the way to perfect them"
About this Quote
Feltham’s line pulls off a neat rhetorical trick: it flatters perfection while quietly dethroning it. “Perfection is immutable” sounds like a metaphysical mic drop, the kind of clean, church-door certainty a 17th-century moralist could safely hang a sermon on. If perfection can’t change, then it’s beyond time, beyond argument, beyond the messy bargaining of daily life. It also can’t learn. It can’t respond. It can’t be revised. Perfection, in Feltham’s framing, is pristine and inert.
The second sentence is where the quote does its real work. “But for things imperfect” shifts the spotlight from the absolute to the human. Feltham isn’t describing marble statues; he’s talking about people, institutions, habits, marriages, governments - anything that carries error like a fingerprint. Change stops being a threat and becomes a moral instrument: not chaos, not fickleness, but the necessary motion of improvement.
The subtext is almost political. In a culture that prized order and distrusted novelty, arguing for change required a defense that didn’t sound like rebellion. Feltham provides one. He concedes the ideal to the conservatives (perfection doesn’t move), then claims the practical world for reformers (imperfection must). It’s an early, elegant justification for revision: if you’re not changing, you’re not preserving perfection; you’re preserving the flaw.
The second sentence is where the quote does its real work. “But for things imperfect” shifts the spotlight from the absolute to the human. Feltham isn’t describing marble statues; he’s talking about people, institutions, habits, marriages, governments - anything that carries error like a fingerprint. Change stops being a threat and becomes a moral instrument: not chaos, not fickleness, but the necessary motion of improvement.
The subtext is almost political. In a culture that prized order and distrusted novelty, arguing for change required a defense that didn’t sound like rebellion. Feltham provides one. He concedes the ideal to the conservatives (perfection doesn’t move), then claims the practical world for reformers (imperfection must). It’s an early, elegant justification for revision: if you’re not changing, you’re not preserving perfection; you’re preserving the flaw.
Quote Details
| Topic | Embrace Change |
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