Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexander Calder

Calder’s line lands like a friendly provocation: it flatters the engineer’s rigor while quietly accusing it of a certain moral laziness. “Good enough means perfect” isn’t really about perfection; it’s about thresholds. Engineering lives and dies by tolerances, specs, safety margins, and deadlines. A bridge that stands is “perfect” in the only way that matters: it performs. In that world, “good enough” is an ethical achievement, a promise kept to physics and to the public.

Calder flips the mirror onto art, where the promise is slipperier. “There’s no such thing as perfect” isn’t self-pity; it’s a description of an arena without a final measuring device. An artwork doesn’t simply function, it persuades, haunts, irritates, seduces. The criteria mutate depending on the viewer, the room, the decade, even the artist’s own next idea. Perfection would imply closure, and closure is often the enemy of vitality.

The subtext is Calder defending the legitimacy of the unfinished, the revisable, the perpetually almost-right. Coming from a sculptor famous for mobiles that literally refuse stillness, the sentiment is also technical: his work depends on balance, chance, and motion, all variables that can’t be locked down once and for all. He’s drawing a cultural boundary line between two kinds of mastery: the engineer’s mastery over solutions and the artist’s mastery over questions. One seeks an endpoint; the other survives by resisting one.