Source: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
“Good, better, best. Never let it rest. 'Til your good is better and your better is best.”
“Remember, Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
Sometimes quoted as "Nothing good ever dies."
Different Seasons (1982), Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption
Source: The Shawshank Redemption
“It was good to be alive; it was better to be young; it was best of all to be in love.”
The Road to the Sea, p. 284
2000s and posthumous publications, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (2001)
Source: Quest for prosperity: the life of a Japanese industrialist. 1988, p. 58
“Lo, sleep is good, better is death--in sooth
The best of all were never to be born.”
“You are not very good if you are not better than your best friends imagine you to be.”
No. 536
Aphorisms on Man (1788)
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.
"La Bégueule" (Contes, 1772)
Variant translations:<p>The perfect is the enemy of the good.
The better is the enemy of the good.
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)
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
Citas
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Conference Madrid 2019
