Quotes on Something Better

Friends of mine said later that they had been riveted by a postgame television close-up of Wade Boggs, sitting alone in the dugout with tears streaming down his face …. I suppose we should all try to find something better or worse to shed tears for than a game, no matter how hard it has been played, but perhaps it is not such a bad thing to see that men can cry at all.

When I hear people talk about juggling or the sacrifices they make for their children, I look at them like they're crazy because sacrifice infers that there was something better to do than the thing - than being with your children.

Be willing and unafraid to write badly, because often the bad stuff...forms a base on which to build something better.

Pain from problems and disappointments, etc., is inevitable in life, but suffering is a choice determined by whether you choose to compare your experience and pain to something better and therefore feel unlucky and bitter or to something worse and therefore feel lucky and grateful!

To different minds, the same world is a hell, and a heaven depending on whether they compare it to something better and so feel disappointed and bitter or something worse and so feel relieved and grateful.

The meaning of things lies not in the things themselves, but in our attitude towards them in particular caused by what we compare it to: something worse and we feel grateful for what we have; something better and we feel somehow let down.

Everybody, my friend, everybody lives for something better to come. That's why we want to be considerate of every man - Who knows what's in him, why he was born and what he can do?

If you're not trying to do something better, then you're not focused on the customer and you'll miss the possibility of making your business great.

Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.

The worst thing about television is that everybody you see on television is doing something better than what you're doing. You never see anybody on TV just sliding off the front of the sofa, with potato chip crumbs all over their shirt.

Now, when anything 'bad' happens, I remember that everything that ever happens to me has within it the seeds of something better. I look for the upside rather than the downside. I ask myself, 'Where's the greater benefit in this event?'

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

They say you don't get over someone until you find someone or something better. As humans, we don't deal well with emptiness. Any empty space must be filled. Immediately. The pain of emptiness is too strong. It compels the victim to fill that place. A single moment with that empty spot causes excruciating pain. That's why we run from distraction to distraction and from attachment to attachment.

In most cases we attach ourselves to in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better, and we also attach ourselves to God in horror of men.

Part of the American ethos is that you want to leave something better for your kids than you had and I know that my parents felt that way and I know that my grandparents felt that way and everybody worked hard so that their kids had a better chance. I just don't want to be the first generation that doesn't do that.

Your first task is to be dissatisfied with yourself, fight sin, and transform yourself into something better. Your second task is to put up with the trials and temptations of this world that will be brought on by the change in your life and to persevere to the very end in the midst of these things.

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the road blocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight. I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.

Now I can only pray that there may be a God -- and a heaven -- or something better.

Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going down under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.