Imperfect
The imperfect, often inaccurately called the imperfect tense in the classical grammars of several Indo-European languages, denotes a grammatical combination of past tense and imperfective aspect, and so may be more precisely called past imperfective. In English, the term refers to a form of the verb that combines past tense with similar aspects, such as incomplete, continuous, habitual, or coincident with another action.
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Famous quotes containing the word imperfect:
“I ... observed the great beauty of American government to be, that the simple machines of representation, carried through all its parts, gives facility for a being moulded at will to fit with the knowledge of the age; that thus, although it should be imperfect in any or all of its parts, it bears within it a perfect principle the principle of improvement.
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—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)
“The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)