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:
“Gratitude is a burden upon our imperfect nature, and we are but too willing to ease ourselves of it, or at least to lighten it as much as we can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“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)