The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.

Anytime you find someone more successful than you are, especially when you’re both engaged in the same business – you know they’re doing something that you aren’t.

I’m not in competition with anybody but myself. My goal is to beat my last performance.

You have competition every day because you set such high standards for yourself that you have to go out every day and live up to that.

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

Do your work with your whole heart, and you will succeed—there's so little competition.

While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.

Winners compare their achievements with their goals, while losers compare their achievements with those of other people.

Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good someone else.

Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any man or order of men.

You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.

The clearest way in the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

It is of particular value to learn to like yourself. Since you must spend so much time with yourself you might as well get some satisfaction out of the relationship.

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

Most people are on the world, not in it—have no conscious sympathy or relationship to anything about them—undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of polished stone, touching but separate.

You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, buy you will never imprison my mind.

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands.

I refuse to accept the idea that the “isness” of man’s present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the “oughtness” that forever confronts him.

It never ceases to amaze me: We all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

You may shoot me with your words, you may cut me with your eyes, you may kill me with your hatefulness, but still, like air, I'll rise.

There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings.