
“My goal is not to be better than anyone else, but to be better than I used to be.”
Variant: you don't need to be better than any one else you just need to be better than you used to be
Source: City of Bones
“My goal is not to be better than anyone else, but to be better than I used to be.”
Variant: you don't need to be better than any one else you just need to be better than you used to be
Section 1.9 <!-- p. 28 -->
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)
Context: My husband is my most ruthless critic. … Sometimes he will say, "It's been said better before." Of course. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anyone else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.
Beverley Lyons and Lee-Ann Fullerton (February 28, 2004) "The Razz: Jimmy's Brent on being funny", The Daily Record.
“I do not try to dance better than anyone else. I only try to to dance better than myself.”
“You have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play better than anyone else.”
An abbreviated version of a quote by California politician Dianne Feinstein, from an interview with Cosmopolitan magazine in October 1985 https://books.google.com/books?id=zmxNAQAAIAAJ&dq=You+have+to+learn+the+rules+of+the+game+and+then+you+have+to+play+better+than+anyone+else&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=%22rules+of+the+game%22, on the topic of women running for public office. The original was: "... I really do have staying power. That's important for women who run for office. When you get in there and push for a lot of new things all at once and don't get them, you don't just leave. You have to commit, be a team player, learn the rules of the game. And then you have to play it better than anyone else."
Misattributed
Referring to George Bernard Shaw in While Rome Burns (1934).
“… you realize that you don't understand yourself any better than you understand anyone else.”
Source: This is Where I Leave You
“Your most vauluable asset can be your willingness to persist longer than anyone else.”
Robert Barton, Acting: Onstage and Off (2009), p. 160
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