Success Quote by Bliss Carman

Carman’s line flatters ambition, then quietly disciplines it. He starts by admitting what most self-help culture still struggles to concede: “a passion for perfection” is almost never “fully developed.” Perfectionism, in his framing, isn’t a finish line; it’s an asymptote. That phrasing matters. “Passion” suggests heat, appetite, even a little irrationality, while “perfection” evokes cold, geometric exactness. Putting them together turns the ideal into a kind of productive contradiction: you’re meant to want something you can’t actually possess.

The pivot is the real work: “but you may note this fact.” Carman shifts from lyrical impulse to observational authority, like a poet slipping into the tone of a moralist. He’s not praising flawlessness; he’s praising the refusal to settle. In “successful lives” the passion is “never wholly lacking” - a deliberately modest claim. Not “success requires perfection,” but “success requires a residue of it,” a trace amount that keeps standards from collapsing into convenience.

Contextually, this sits neatly in a late-19th/early-20th century Protestant-inflected ethic of self-cultivation: character as craft, life as workmanship. Yet Carman avoids the harshness of pure Victorian striving. The subtext is permission: you’re allowed to be unfinished. The demand is also clear: if you excise that inner editor entirely, you don’t get freedom; you get drift. The line works because it reframes perfectionism from pathology to compass - dangerous when total, indispensable when partial.