“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Bjarne Stroustrup (1950) Danish computer scientist, creator of C++
Conference Madrid 2019
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. <br class="br">"La Bégueule" (Contes, 1772) <br class="br">Variant translations:<p>The perfect is the enemy of the good.<br>The better is the enemy of the good. <br class="br">translation of earlier traditional Italian Il meglio è nemico del bene, attested since 1603: Proverbi italiani (Italian Proverbs), by Orlando Pescetti http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/orlando-pescetti/ (c. 1556 – c. 1624) ( p. 30 https://books.google.com/books?id=0fkXqSJmiyEC&pg=PA30-IA2&q=%22Il%20meglio%20%C3%A8%20nemico%20del%20bene%22#v=onepage, p. 45 https://books.google.com/books?id=IRPam75-SI4C&pg=RA1-PT45&q=%22Il%20meglio%20%C3%A8%20nemico%20del%20bene%22#v=onepage) <br class="br">Voltaire cites this saying in his poem "La Bégueule" ("The prude woman") while ascribing it to an unnamed "Italian sage"; he also gives the saying (without attribution) in Italian (Il meglio è l'inimico del bene [note spelling difference: l'inimico instead of nemico for "[the] enemy") in the article "Art Dramatique" ("Dramatic Art", 1770) in the Dictionnaire philosophique <br class="br">Citas
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French writer, historian, and philosopher 1694–1778Related quotes
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p.361
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