In the English-speaking world the aphorism is commonly attributed to Voltaire, who quoted an Italian proverb in his Questions sur l'Encyclopédie [fr] in 1770: "Il meglio è l'inimico del bene".
[1] It subsequently appeared in his moral poem, La Bégueule, which starts:[2] Dans ses écrits, un sage ItalienDit que le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
[3] Aristotle and other classical philosophers propounded the principle of the golden mean which counsels against extremism in general.
[5] In his tragedy King Lear (1606), the Duke of Albany warns of "striving to better, oft we mar what's well" and in Sonnet 103:Were it not sinful then, striving to mend,To mar the subject that before was well?The 1893 Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern, English and Foreign Sources lists a similar proverb, which it claims is of Chinese provenance: "Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without one".
More recent applications include Robert Watson-Watt propounding a "cult of the imperfect", which he stated as "Give them the third best to go on with; the second best comes too late, the best never comes";[6] economist George Stigler's assertion that "If you never miss a plane, you're spending too much time at the airport";[7][8] and, in the field of computer program optimization, Donald Knuth's statement that "Premature optimization is the root of all evil".