Life & Wisdom Quote by Janet Erskine Stuart

Perfection, in Janet Erskine Stuart's hands, isn't a costume you put on. It's a return to your own skin. "To aim at the best" sounds like the usual Victorian-era moral push toward excellence, but she splices it to an unexpected claim: the highest aspiration and the truest self are not competing projects. They're "one and the same thing". The line works because it refuses the modern binary that selfhood equals authenticity and excellence equals performance. Stuart suggests the opposite: the more seriously you pursue the good, the more you uncover what you already are at the core.

The subtext is quietly theological and quietly defiant. Stuart, writing out of a religious intellectual tradition where character formation is central, frames "the best" less as achievement than as vocation: the fullest expression of a person shaped by conscience, discipline, and love. "Essentially ourselves" signals an inner identity not invented by taste or trend, but discovered through commitment. That phrasing also inoculates the idea of striving against vanity; if the goal is to become more yourself, ambition loses its ego and gains a moral dimension.

Context matters: Stuart lived in a culture that prized self-improvement and social respectability, yet she steers that energy inward. The sentence is a subtle critique of external metrics, insisting that real excellence isn't mimicry of ideals imposed from outside. It's a claim that the best life isn't a departure from identity; it's identity, clarified.