Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Don't bother just to be better than others. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
William Faulkner
Age: 64 †
Born: 1897
Born: September 25
Died: 1962
Died: July 6
Author
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Short Story Writer
Writer
New Albany
Mississippi
William Cuthbert Faulkner
William Falkner
William Cuthbert Falkner
Better
Bother
Trying
Excellence
Track
Inspirational
Running
Predecessors
Others
Runners
Dream
Improvement
Character
Criminals
More quotes by William Faulkner
I love Virginians because Virginians are all snobs and I like snobs. A snob has to spend so much time being a snob that he has little time left to meddle with you.
William Faulkner
...the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.
William Faulkner
Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don't bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
Try to be better than yourself.
William Faulkner
The past isn't over. It isn't even past.
William Faulkner
People need trouble - a little frustration to sharpen the spirit on, toughen it. Artists do I don't mean you need to live in a rat hole or gutter, but you have to learn fortitude, endurance. Only vegetables are happy.
William Faulkner
The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.
William Faulkner
The only rule I have is to quit while it’s still hot. Never write yourself out. Always quit when it’s going good. Then it’s easier to take it up again. If you exhaust yourself, then you’ll get into a dead spell and you’ll have trouble with it.
William Faulkner
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string: in sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
William Faulkner
Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.
William Faulkner
That's the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
William Faulkner
To me, all human behavior is unpredictable and, considering man's frailty... and... the ramshackle universe he functions in, it's... all irrational.
William Faulkner
Like a fellow running from or toward a gun ain't got time to worry whether the word for what he is doing is courage or cowardice.
William Faulkner
the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat
William Faulkner
It's the most satisfying occupation man has discovered yet, because you never can quite do it as well as you want to, so there's always something to wake up tomorrow morning to do.
William Faulkner
Most men are a little better than their circumstances give them a chance to be.
William Faulkner
To the man grown the long crowded mile of his boyhood becomes less than the throw of a stone.
William Faulkner
A fellow gets to thinking. About all the sorrow and afflictions in this world how it's liable to strike anywhere, like lightning.
William Faulkner
When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with each blow of the switch: Now you are aware of me! Now I am something in your secret and selfish life, who have marked your blood with my own for ever and ever.
William Faulkner
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread an not the interval between.
William Faulkner
