Outdo Yourself Quotes & Sayings

You are not in competition with anybody except yourself;plan to outdo your past not other people. — Jaachynma N.E. Agu

When all is said and done, no literature can outdo the cynicism of real life; you won't intoxicate with one glass someone who has already drunk up a whole barrel. — Anton Chekhov

London wasn't the first city I'd lived in, but it was certainly the largest. Anywhere else there is always the chance of seeing someone you know or, at the very least, a smiling face. Not here. Commuters crowd the trains, eager to outdo their fellow travelers in an escalating privacy war of paperbacks, headphones and newspapers. A woman next to me on the Northern Line on day held the Metro just inches from her face; it was only three stops later that I noticed she was not reading but crying. It was hard not to offer sympathy and harder still to not start crying myself. — Belle De Jour

It is idle to say that nations can struggle to outdo each other in building armaments and never use them. History demonstrates the contrary, and we have but to go back to the last war to see the appalling effect of nations competing in great armaments. — Frank B. Kellogg

Competition is. In every business, no matter how small or how large, someone is just around the corner forever trying to steal your ideas and build his success out of your imagination, struggling after that which you have toiled endless years to secure, striving to outdo you in each and every way. If such a competitor would work as hard to originate as he does to copy, he would much more quickly gain success. — Alice Foote MacDougall

It's hard to outdo the Lord in generosity. — Jerold Panas

You know how to manipulate me, and I know how to manipulate you. That makes us even.
No. We'll never be even.
We'll always be trying to outdo each other. I won't say it aloud, any more than I'll admit that I like it that way; that some primal, powerful side of me craves the challenge and always has. — A.G. Howard

In the ancient tales, to which each Viking aspired, strenght was the only virtue, iron the only currency that mattered. Loki with his cunning, whereby a weaker man might outdo a stronger one, was an anathema to these folk. — Mark Lawrence

My father and I had a really good relationship. We're cool. I am not trying to outdo him or anything like that. — Ziggy Marley

Socrates and Phaedrus, like Odysseus, must sail by the Sirens without being enchanted: instead of listening to their voices, they will outdo them with their own logos. . . . Plato's Odysseus does not even let the song of the Sirens enter him but deafens it with his own rational discourse. Philosophy is itself a Sirens' song, the antidote against the dispersion and drowning of the soul into the body, that is, against the ultimate wandering. — Silvia Montiglio

We're always trying to outdo ourselves, trying to do better, trying to write better songs. I think we want to inspire other people as well, so that's what we'll try to do through future songs. — Josh Dun

He who fights with guns and knives is a coward! For how easy is it to kill with the single pull of a trigger? And how does human flesh stand to a sharpened metal? Even an idiot can kill with a gun and a knife! A man needs no courage at all to stand behind these things that make him feel invincible and bigger than he ever will be! I don't say that no one should fight! Because battles must be fought, and wars will always be won! But let those who fight, fight with bare hands! The measure of true strength! With his hands and feet and nothing but! The country with truly strong men is able to have soldiers that need not a knife, that need no guns! And if you can soar even higher than that; fight with your pens! Let us all write! And see the substance of the man through his philosophies and through his beliefs! And let one philosophy outdo another! Let one belief outlast another! And let this be how we determine the outcome of a war! — C. JoyBell C.

A novelist must believe he can outdo himself. Or his creative drive would die. — Johan Fundin

It's your ability to inspire and uplift other people that matters, not your ability to outdo them. — Doug Larson

In high school I was best in music class on the trumpet, but the prizes went to the boys with blue eyes. I made up my mind to outdo anybody white on my horn. — Miles Davis

I'm not going to try to go out there and outdo him. I don't have to try to outdo him, I'm Shaq. — Shaquille O'Neal

Their conflicting sounds oppose one another, outdo one another, and fight to be better than one another. The crescendo of the heart being ripped to shreds, loves ... . — Mai Nishikata

Of what use is the universe? What is the practical application of a million galaxies? Yet just because it has no use, it has a use- which may sound like a paradox, but is not. What, for instance, is the use of playing music? If you play to make money, to outdo some other artist, to be a person of culture, or to improve your mind, you are not really playing- for your mind is not on the music. You don't swing. When you come to think of it, playing or listening to music is a pure luxury, an addiction, a waste of valuable time and money for nothing more than making elaborate patterns of sound. — Alan Watts

Your suns and worlds are not within my ken,
I merely watch the plaguey state of men.
The little god of earth remains the same queer sprite
As on the first day, or in primal light.
His life would be less difficult, poor thing,
Without your gift of heavenly glimmering;
He calls it Reason, using light celestial
Just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.
To me he seems, with deference to Your Grace,
One of those crickets, jumping round the place,
Who takes his flying leaps, with legs so long,
Then falls to grass and chants the same old song;
But, not content with grasses to repose in,
This one will hunt for muck to stick his nose in. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

We're surrounded by violence, and we see so much of it on TV, especially the news programs. We almost become numb. And that forces filmmakers to try to outdo themselves ... They say, 'Look what I can do,' and it becomes like a showoff thing. To me, that's ridiculous. Filmmaking isn't a contest! — Jan De Bont

I push every day against forces that say you have to go faster, be more effective, be more productive, you have to constantly outdo yourself, you have to constantly outdo your neighbor - all of the stuff that creates an incredibly productive society, but also a very neurotic one. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Once you are successful, there's a very seductive rhythm at work that keeps you wanting to outdo yourself. By the end of 'Spirit' I felt like I didn't want to get into that trap. It almost makes you cartoon-like. — Jewel

I love being under pressure. Even the pressure put on me by the media. That is how you outdo yourself. — Tony Parker

This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is - A sort of soup or broth, or brew, Or hotchpotch of all sorts of fishes, That Greenwich never could outdo; Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffron, Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace; All these you eat at Terre's tavern, In that one dish of Bouillabaisse. — William Makepeace Thackeray

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself. — Marguerite Yourcenar

Invest in yourself. Invest in self-discipline. Invest in self-satisfaction. Have complete control over your own thoughts and convictions, and never stop aiming to outdo yourself. — Lionel Suggs

Across the Atlantic, in the scattered, far-flung, rural settlements of colonial America, hospitality had become a central concern, and hostesses, like peacocks displaying their iridescent plumage, tried to outdo one another with their creative food displays. — Kate Christensen

Participation in the collective life of the polis both restrains the extraordinary individual and enlarges the ordinary individual, allowing him to participate in the extraordinary. An individual can achieve participatory excellence via the accomplishments of the polis and need not always be caught up in the agnostic struggle to outdo his peers. — Rebecca Goldstein

You can't write good satirical fiction in America because reality will quickly outdo anything you might invent. — Philip Roth

Modern Hinduism, modern Jainism, and Buddhism branched off at the same time. For some period, each seemed to have wanted to outdo the others in grotesqueness and humbuggism. — Swami Vivekananda

We live in a highly competitive society, each of us trying to outdo the other in wealth, in popularity or social prestige, in dress, in scholastic grades or golf scores. One is often tempted to say that conflict, rather than cooperation, is the great governing principle of human life. — S.I. Hayakawa

It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make... — Soseki Natsume

I circle around them, my sword pointed in their direction. "Hermes Trismegistus. Ostanes the Persian. Olympiodorous of Thebes---"
I stop, feeling like an idiot. These necromancers and the ridiculous names they give themselves. They're always trying to outdo one another.
"You five," I said instead. "By the authority of King Malcolm of Anglia, I am commanded to arrest you for the crime of witchcraft. — Virginia Boecker

Would we not do well to have the pleasing of God as our motive rather than to try to elevate ourselves above our brother and outdo another? — Ezra Taft Benson

Chicago's always been known as this meat and potatoes place, and a lot of restaurants play that up. They try to outdo each other by adding another 10 ounces, so their 80 ounce steak becomes a 90 ounce steak with 10 pounds of mashed potatoes on the side. — Graham Elliot

In the race for wealth, a neighbor tries to outdo his neighbor, but this strife is good for men. For the potter envies potter, and the carpenter the carpenter, and the beggar rivals the beggar, and the singer the singer. — Hesiod

When one can do better than everyone else in the same walk, one does not make any very painful exertions to outdo oneself. The progress of improvement ceases nearly at the point where competition ends. — William Hazlitt

The poor man's son, whom heaven has in its anger visited with ambition, goes beyong admiration of palaces to envy. He labours all his life to outdo his competitors, only to find the end that the rich are no happier than the poor in the things that really matter. — Adam Smith

Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. "He talks every language as well as the rest of us," Susy had once said of him, "but at least he talks one language better than the others. — Edith Wharton

Good, modern, civilized Western white men are so easily cowed by charges of bias and privilege that they work tirelessly to outdo each other with social displays of moral universalism - by cucking themselves in every way imaginable. Western — Jack Donovan