Competitive Quotes

Misery, like yoga, is not a competitive sport ~ Matt Haig

Zen students see themselves as athletes. Their competitive sport is enlightenment; only with enlightenment do we compete. ~ Frederick Lenz

Because our brains make a mountain out of a molehill of uncertainty, we tend to prefer competitive risk because it feels more secure. But the empirical evidence says that market risk is less risky than competitive risk. ~ Whitney Johnson

sustained high gross profit margins relative to industry peers tends to indicate durable competitive advantage. Zeroing ~ Lawrence A. Cunningham

I run all the brands like cousins. You want your cousins to do well, but you want to do better. All of our brands want to win, but we certainly want to fight fair and coordinate as much as we can behind the scenes. But to the consumer, we want to offer the broadest, most competitive set of products that we can. ~ Sam Yagan

We've got some very strong and robust ladies, but, when your life is at risk, I think the strain of that in a competitive situation will tell when you're trying to win. The mental stress I think would be pretty difficult for a lady to deal with in a practical fashion. I just don't think they have aptitude to win a Formula 1 race. ~ Stirling Moss

Space is becoming increasingly congested, contested, and competitive. ~ Anonymous

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money. ~ Seth Godin

I don't try and be competitive with auditions. When I go on one, I kind of just forget about it. ~ Charlie Tahan

But the primary reason for wanting the dollar to become more competitive in the near future is that we may need an increase in exports this year and in 2007 to sustain the economy's current pace of expansion. ~ Martin Feldstein

This papal document - which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church - was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch, French, Belgian, German, and other Euro-Christian empires that spanned the world.13 It was the genocide card that was given to every white Christian nation. ~ Brian D. McLaren

People sometimes ask me to name the greatest coach in NFL history. George Halas may have set the standard, but Don Shula has won more games than anyone, and he has done it in the most competitive era. He had an incomparable ability to evaluate players, to motivate them, and to teach them the game of football. ~ Marv Levy

There's plenty of room for all sorts of movies and all sorts of comedies, so I never saw that as a competitive thing. I think there's room in the marketplace for everything. ~ Steve Carell

The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured tress pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries-there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground. ~ Peter Wohlleben

Our system of private health insurance that fails to provide coverage to so many of our citizens also contributes to the double-digit health care inflation that is making America less competitive in the global economy. ~ John Conyers

We won't make the weak stronger by making the strong weaker, as a very wise man once said. That applies to the economy as well. If Germany were less competitive, the euro area as a whole would lose, because less could be produced then. ~ Mario Draghi

Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage. ~ Adam Vardy

In ordinary perception, the senses send an overwhelming flood of information to the brain, which the brain then filters down to a trickle it can manage for the purpose of survival in a highly competitive world. Man has become so rational, so utilitarian, that the trickle becomes most pale and thin. It is efficient, for mere survival, but it screens out the most wondrous parts of man's potential experience without his even knowing it. We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright ... ~ Tom Wolfe

I'm a competitive person and I love the challenge of mastering new things. ~ Sasha Cohen

When we pick up the newspaper at breakfast, we expect - we even demand - that it brings us momentous events since the night before ... We expect our two-week vacations to be romantic, exotic, cheap, and effortless..We expect anything and everything. We expect the contradictory and the impossible. We expect compact cars which are spacious; luxurious cars which are economical. We expect to be rich and charitable, powerful and merciful, active and reflective, kind and competitive. We expect to be inspired by mediocre appeals for excellence, to be made literate by illiterate appeals for literacy ... to go to 'a church of our choice' and yet feel its guiding power over us, to revere God and to be God. Never have people been more the masters of their environment. Yet never has a people felt more deceived and disappointed. For never has a people expected so much more than the world could offer. ~ Daniel J. Boorstin

How very important it is to bring about in the human mind the radical revolution. The crisis is a crisis in consciousness, a crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient traditions. Considering what the world is now with all the misery, conflict, destructive brutality, aggression and so on ... man is still as he was, is still brutal, violent, aggressive, acquisitive, competitive and has built a society along these lines. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

If you're ranked number one in the world it's because you've earned it, and I think the only way to really get there is to have that ability and to have it nurtured in a very competitive environment at an early age. ~ Andre Agassi

Choose one thing and become a master of it. Choose a second thing and become a master of that. When you become a master of two worlds (say, engineering and business), you can bring them together in a way that will a) introduce hot ideas to each other, so they can have idea sex and make idea babies that no one has seen before and b) create a competitive advantage because you can move between worlds, speak both languages, connect the tribes, mash the elements to spark fresh creative insight until you wake up with the epiphany that changes your life. ~ Justine Musk

Stacy had this more fluid style. You meet him, he's just such a nice guy. Tony's an awesome guy too, but back then, he was a real aggressive kid and they were in such a different place. Stacy was so sensitive and at the same time so competitive when it came to his skating. ~ John Robinson

You're playing competitive, and it's always better to play four competitive rounds than it is two because you sit there for a weekend and then you start all over again. ~ John Daly

How are we doing in the electronics field as opposed to, you know, we hear how advanced the Japanese are? Do you think we're still pretty competitive? Oh, yes. ~ Jack Kilby

For a competitive junkie like me, golf is a great solution because it smacks you in the face every time you think you have accomplished something. That to me has taken over a lot of the energy and competitiveness for basketball. ~ Michael Jordan

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through ... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player." ~ Rainn Wilson

I was a competitive swimmer in middle school and high school. ~ Katharine McPhee

The integrative powers of life are manifested in the phenomena of symbiosis between organelles, in the varied forms of partnership within the same species or between different species; in the phenomena of regeneration, in lower species, of complete individuals from their fragments; in the re-formation of scrambled embryonic organs, etc. The self-assertive tendency is equally ubiquitous in the competitive struggle for life. ~ Arthur Koestler

Apple's approach to career development is yet another way it runs contrary to the norms at other companies. The prevalent attitude for workers in the corporate world is to consider their growth trajectory. What's my path up? How do I get to the next level? Companies, in turn, spend an inordinate amount of time and money grooming their people for new responsibilities. They labor to find just the right place for people. But what if it turns out all that thinking is wrong? What if companies encouraged employees to be satisfied where they are because they're good at what they do, not to mention because that might be what's best for shareholders?

Instead of employees fretting that they were stuck in terminal jobs, what if they exalted in having found their perfect jobs? A certain amount of office politics might evaporate in a corporate culture where career growth is not considered tantamount to professional fulfilment. Shareholders, after all, don't care about fiefdoms and egos. There are many professionals who would find it liberating to work at what they are good at, receive competitive killer compensation, and not have to worry about supervising others or jockeying for higher rungs on an org chart. ~ Adam Lashinsky

Veblen argues that the existing social hierarchy is actively maintained by competitive consumption among all classes of society. Thus, consumerism, far from being something that is inflicted upon the working classes by the scheming bourgeoisi, is something that the working classes actively participate in maintaining - even though it is not in their collective interest to do so. If the working classes had wanted to buy out the capitalists, they could easily have done so by now, simply by saving a fraction of the wage increases that they have received over the years. But instead they have chosen to max out their spending on consumer goods. ~ Joseph Heath

And challenging your neighborhood to a round of competitive outdoor decorating. Because you're not really celebrating the birth of Jesus unless your house can be spotted by passing aircraft. ~ Molly Harper

The competitive landscape of hedge funds is rapidly changing, as hundreds of funds are opened and closed every year. For example, Pensions & Investments reported that 784 new funds were started in 2009, while 1,023 existing funds were closed. Amazingly, the median life of a hedge fund is only 31 months. Fewer than 15 percent of hedge funds last longer than six years, and 60 percent of them disappear in less than three years.[3] ~ Gordon Murray

During dinner a sea turtle stopped by for a visit. At three or four feet in length... the turtle swam alongside for about twenty minutes, its head bobbing just above the surface of the water. Then with laughing eyes the turtle passed me..being left behind by a turtle pricked up my competitive nature. I pulled harder trying to keep up, but I couldn't catch the turtle. Soon I was reduced to laughter. " I am in the North Atlantic in a rowboat, racing a turtle...and loosing. Okay, so they can swim thirty miles an hour. Out here, I am the tortoise and it's the hare. ~ Tori Murden McClure

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives. ~ Kay Redfield Jamison

To dissociate politicians from capitalists is slightly disingenuous, to put it mildly. U.S. lawmakers are competitive and auction themselves to the highest bidder via the lobby system. ~ Tariq Ali

In today's competitive business world, it is not enough to do your job well; no, to be truly effective, you have to develop skills and strategies for things you'll never have to do, and situations that will never come up. ~ Rob Payne

Someone once described Ken Lewis to me as the most competitive person in the history of the United States, including the Union Army. ~ Charles Duhigg

Rolling through Manhattan in his limousine, Donald confided that he was nervous about his pending marriage to Slovenian model Melania Knauss, which was just ten days away. "It's all in the hunt and once you get it, it loses some of its energy," he said. "I think competitive, successful men feel that way about women. Don't you agree? Really, don't you agree? ~ Timothy L. O'Brien

We're a society of brats, fighting over the same toys. That, for me, is the closest we come to be inherently evil as a people. It leads to selfishness, inflexibility, and impatience -- among so many other traits that are ugly and harmful. We're combative, competitive, petty, and suffer from one fatal flaw that I can never get my head around. We recognize behavior in others that makes us insane, while turning right around and doing the exact thing to someone else. ~ Trevor D. Richardson

There are cliques in Bollywood, and people stick together, but I have always tried to stick to my work. As an industry, Bollywood is very competitive, and I'm very competitive as a person, but I've never been a part of any clique, and I've always worked with all actors and directors, all camps. ~ Priyanka Chopra

Scott Brown is a superstar. Scott Brown won a race that nobody expected Republicans to even be competitive in, and he was able to do it at a time when nothing else going on, so he captured the attention of conservatives across the country. ~ Carl Forti

I'm a different person off the court than I am on the court, where I'm very competitive, a perfectionist, and I can be hard on myself sometimes. Off the court, nothing really bothers me. I'm easy-going. ~ Mary Pierce

Mathematicians - for what they do - are really poorly rewarded. And it's a very competitive field, almost as bad as being a concert pianist. ~ Gian-Carlo Rota

Education is how to help the person who's lost a job. Education is how to make sure we've got a workforce that's productive and competitive. ~ George W. Bush

been baffled when Jobs insisted that he was not motivated by money, but it was partly true. He had neither Ellison's conspicuous consumption needs nor Gates's philanthropic impulses nor the competitive urge to see how high ~ Walter Isaacson

What people are feeling is the similarity in what I do and how I'm capable of breaking a new artist into a competitive field. People can't wrap their head around the fact that Gaga did not do that on her own. She didn't. There was a Laurieann Gibson. ~ Laurieann Gibson

So for me having that element of being able to be competitive wasn't a problem. I'm very competitive. I thought if I could skate first, acting would come second. I could say my lines and then go do what I was saying. You don't have to fake it, you're not really acting. ~ John Robinson

I don't think I've got enough energy to be competitive! Most of my energy is just devoted to me being nervous and trying to deal with the situation. ~ Max Irons

Changing technologies, changing marketplaces, and even changing trends in anti-competitive practices have all presented challenges to antitrust enforcement. ~ Al Franken

I work with Sally and I can see Sally doing that. She is very aggressive. Very fun loving and charming ... and pushy in a very competitive way and a very healthy way and a very good actress. ~ Dabney Coleman

Cade stood midfield, waiting for Zach to take his place at the line of scrimmage.

"When's the last time you threw a football?" Zach asked worriedly.

Aside from the few times Cade had tossed one around casually with friends, a long time. "About twelve years."

Zach threw him a panicked look.

"I won't push it," Cade said. It wasn't as if his shoulder was entirely unusable; in fact, on a daily basis it didn't bother him at all. His rotator cuff simply couldn't withstand the repetitive stress of competitive football. "I just want to see what I can do." He pointed emphatically. "And if the answer is 'not much,' you better not tell a soul. I've got a reputation to uphold here."

Zach smiled, loosening up. "All right. I don't want to stand in the way of you reliving your glory days or whatever."

"Good. But in case this all goes south, my car keys are in the outside pocket of my duffle bag. When you drive me to the emergency room, if I'm too busy mumbling incoherently from the pain, just tell them I've got Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance."

Zach's eyes went wide.

"I'm kidding, Zach. Now get moving. ~ Julie James

I love competing. I am so competitive. I definitely need to win because I hate losing. I am the type who if I know I will lose I won't compete. ~ Usain Bolt

When I [first] went to university, I was doing foreign languages, because I had done them since I was 13 years old. I had done French and German. I picked up Italian, just sort of blasted through the exams, [and then] took off overseas, because I wanted to be an actor. I thought, "I'm just not academic." I'm not very competitive, in terms of acting. But since going back to university, I've realized, I am highly competitive. ~ Nick Offerman

Writing ... is practically the only activity a person can do that is not competitive. ~ Paul Theroux

Everyone must be in the same competitive situation, including on the fiscal level. ~ Francois Hollande

People always think that designers hate each other. And we're certainly a competitive lot, but we also enjoy each other's company. ~ Michael Kors

A competitive culture endures by tearing people down. ~ Jules Henry

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. ~ Wallace Stegner

It was about the worst outcome possible for my competitive wife: a town of contented also-rans. ~ Gillian Flynn

I'm not into being competitive. I never saw myself as a competitive type of person. ~ Nonito Donaire

Roughly speaking, when you are dealing with business firms operating in a competitive system, you can assume that they're going to act rationally. Why? Because someone in a firm who buys things at $10 and sells them for $8.00 isn't going to last very long in that firm. ~ Ronald Coase

Wrestling is such a competitive sport worldwide. ~ Kurt Angle

I'm probably one of the most competitive people ever. ~ Kyrie Irving

But the thing which had made him fall for her, fall properly, was the way she seemed so calm and so quiet and so sad. Surrounded by noisy bankers showing off, and their variously pushy or beady or anxious or competitive wives, she seemed to be from somewhere else; a place where people carried their own burdens; a grander and realer and more honourable place. Roger didn't know that Matya spent a lot of that evening thinking about home, but he could tell that she was thinking about something, and it was that other thing which, for him, did it. ~ John Lanchester

I'm quite competitive. Not with other models but with myself. I have to win. ~ Arizona Muse

I started puberty very late. I was nearly sixteen. And for complicated reasons this late arrival of my puberty caused me to stop playing competitive tennis. But before my puberty problem, I had trouble with my lower back and with my left testicle. ~ Jonathan Ames

People are going to get older and young guys are going to come in and race and get more competitive. ~ Dale Earnhardt

No matter what an individual decides to become, hard work and determination is very important in today's competitive world. You may also encounter hardships along the way, but you must not get discouraged and you push on in order to fulfill your goals. ~ Tom Monaghan

Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says "7x9=63," because it will remind him of mother. ~ Dave Barry

Runners are competitive folks. I think some might feel slighted they haven't got more recognition. I think they have a point. In running, you won't necessarily get noticed just for turning in good performances. ~ Dean Karnazes

The life of a dancer is not for everyone. You really have to have some thick skin. You really have to know what you're going into and how competitive the field is. ~ Stephen Boss

It was a bit of a surprise for us that we had problems in Hungary. But in reality, I think the car could have been pretty competitive with a trouble-free race. ~ Fernando Alonso

The final advantage is the same that applies in every other competitive venture. If you would like to write better than everyone else, you have to want to write better than everyone else. You must take an obsessive pride in the smallest details of your craft. And you must be willing to defend what you've written against the various middlemen--editors, agents, and publishers--whose sights may be different from yours, whose standards are not as high. Too many writers are browbeaten into settling for less than their best. ~ William Zinsser

I tend to be really competitive when it comes to Scattergories. ~ Mandy Moore

My model, such as it is, is a mentorship model, which is to say that I care personally, and I involve myself personally/emotionally with the work of each student, and I try to make it such that they want to reach for more, do better, risk more, try new things, abandon limited objectives, individuate, and so on. For me it is personal, to the best of my ability, and it is about making more of the writer and of the writer's task in each case. I also think it's possible to do this, to teach in this way, in a classroom free of rancor and backbiting and competitive jostling. So: my class should be a place of peace, a place where anything is possible, where the code of realism is in disrepute, and the worst thing you can say, the absolutely verboten thing, is the phrase: The New Yorker. ~ Rick Moody

In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. ~ C.S. Lewis

Man is by nature competitive, combative, ambitious, jealous, envious, and vengeful. ~ Arthur Keith

When employees feel valued, and are more productive and engaged, they create a culture that can truly be a strategic advantage in today's competitive market. ~ Michael Hyatt

Any physical practice can be a competitive sport. What level you can take postures to create the maximum challenge and show your maximum skill, maximum control - it's not a combat game. It's a benefit to you. ~ Rajashree Choudhury

The New Finance focused on the market's major systematic mistake. In failing to appreciate the strength of competitive forces in a market economy, it over estimates the length of the short run. In doing so, it overreacts to records of success and failure for individual companies, driving the prices of successful firms too high and their unsuccessful counterparts too low. ~ Robert Haugen

Failure can't live in the company of perseverance.

Failure eventually surrenders. Corky and Shirley taught me this. It took them ten years to win Blackpool. Ten years! Some people would give up and throw in the towel after ten minutes! Every time they lost, all the people around them blamed Corky. But he was relentless. He was going to prove his talent not just to the naysayers but also to himself. There were many times as a competitive dancer when I felt deflated and not good enough, but I never gave up--the Ballases never let me. You always have to keep on moving forward and having faith. Think of the greatest leaders we know. What do they all have in common? They all fought some uphill battle to get where they are. Call it tenacity, persistence, or plain old stubbornness. When someone or something tries to push me off my path, that's when I dig my heels in even harder. I'll be honest: in some areas of my life, I have this mastered. In others, I need a little reminder now and then. There's nothing you can't do if you see it through. ~ Derek Hough

APM's core purpose of creating innovative new products and services means dealing with constant technological and competitive change, generating novel ideas, and continually reducing product development schedules. ~ Jim Highsmith

I get very competitive, mostly in acting though. When I'm going out for a role or something, that's when I really get very territorial about things. ~ Molly Quinn

In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. ~ Ikujiro Nonaka

In a competitive world, not everybody can follow the pace; you will leave people out. We now accept that we must take care of these people. You cannot let them die in the streets; people will not accept it. And that is right, too. ~ Arsene Wenger

I've been an athlete all my life. I was a competitive figure skater, and then when I realized skating was not an adult sport I took up tennis and played that quite seriously from the time I was about 18. ~ Condoleezza Rice

I'm very competitive with myself. I'm a scheduler. ~ Kendall Jenner

If I was 30th in points and not making races and not being competitive in races, I could understand them saying I'm over-the-hill or I'm ready to quit or whatever. ~ Dale Earnhardt

How can the United States be competitive globally if higher education is unaffordable? Germany, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Scotland and Sweden have no tuition for college. Other countries have low tuition. We need the best educated workforce in the world. Instead of spending endless amounts on the military, we need to invest in our young people. ~ Bernie Sanders

Don't try to be all things to all people. Concentrate on selling something unique that you know there is a need for, offer competitive pricing and good customer service. ~ Lillian Vernon

Yes, it's a competitive world, but where is your heart? ~ Henri Nouwen

As a member of a competitive team, you want to make sure you have yourself ready to play. You don't control anything but what you do. ~ Joe Torre

If someone has children, the first thing they want is for them to be happy, and then become someone in life and all that. But the educational system, I mean always, not just now, creates competitive, successful people, and does not educate them to be happy. The problem is that success gives money, not happiness. The eternal problem. ~ Jorge Bucay

Bringing more large sporting events to Africa would help the continent develop sports policies and at the same time optimize its peoples' chances of achieving competitive success. ~ Richard Attias

I always wanted a family environment, a community where a creator like myself could connect and vibe with other creators without feeling competitive. ~ Michelle Phan

I think if I get the training spot on, the equipment perfect and I'm in the right state of mind, I can get a result there from no competitive action. ~ David Millar

I've done a lot of basketball drills, not a whole lot of competitive stuff. I have basically been in the gym everyday working on my game, working on the time off that I've had from the game, just getting myself prepared mentally and physically for the season. ~ Grant Hill

I can text in complete sentences. Oh, yeah, it's a skill." He smiled, proud of his accomplishments. "And, thanks to my mom being a competitive dancer as a teen, I know how to do the Lindy hop and the jitterbug."
I sat bolt upright, and Akinli rolled his eyes.
"I swear, if you tell me you can jitterbug, I'm going to . . . I don't even know. Set something on fire. No one can dance like that."
I pursed my lips and dusted off my shoulder, a thing I'd seen Elizabeth do when she was bragging.
As if he was accepting a challenge, he shrugged off his backpack and stood, holding out a hand for me.
I took it and positioned myself in front of him as he shook his head, grinning.
"All right, we'll take this slow. Five, six, seven, eight."
In unison, we rock stepped and triple stepped, falling into the rhythm in our head. After a minute, he got brave and swung me around, lining me up for those peppy kicks I loved so much.
People walked by, pointing and laughing, but it was one of those moments when I knew we weren't being mocked; we were being envied.
We stepped on each other's toes more than once, and after he accidentally knocked his head into my shoulder, he threw his hands up.
"Unbelievable," he said, almost as if he was complaining. "I can't wait to tell my mom this. She's gonna think I'm lying. All those years dancing in the kitchen thinking I was special, and then I run across a master. ~ Kiera Cass