When I have one martini, I feel bigger, wiser, taller. When I have a second, I feel superlative. When I have more, there's no holding me.
William FaulknerRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Aim to surpass your own limits rather than merely competing with others.
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal growth and self-improvement over comparison with others. It encourages individuals to set ambitious goals that challenge them to exceed their own capabilities, instead of just striving to outperform peers or predecessors.
Themes
DreamBetterSelf-ImprovementGoalsMotivation
In practice
Example use cases
During a graduation speech to inspire students about their future career paths.
More from William Faulkner
All quotes βI feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.
William FaulknerRead
When grown people speak of the innocence of children, they dont really know what they mean. Pressed, they will go a step further and say, Well, ignorance then. The child is neither. There is no crime which a boy of eleven had not envisaged long ago. His only innocence is, he may not be old enough to desire the fruits of it...his ignorance is, he does not know how to commit it...
William FaulknerRead
Maybe times are never strange to women: it is just one continuous monotonous thing full of the repeated follies of their menfolks.
William FaulknerRead
He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that any more than for pride or fear....One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William FaulknerRead
Ever since then I have believed that God is not only a gentleman and a sport; he is a Kentuckian too.
William FaulknerRead
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