William Merritt Chase Quotes

Comparison is a disease. I never felt any competition, since I never compared myself to others. I only focus on my work. I never feel pressurised and do films in my style. Also, I'm very active since childhood, and that gives me the edge to always put my best.

Doing the best at this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment.

For me, it's just staying in the present, enjoying what I'm doing, and making sure I'm making the kind of improvements and moves forward that I want to.

Are your thoughts worthy of you? If not - now is the time to change them. You can begin right were you are right now. Nothing matters but this moment and what you are focusing your attention on.

I don't have any romanticism about any part of my past. I think of it only inasmuch as it gave me pleasure or helped me grow psychologically. That is the only thing that interests me about yesterday. I don't believe in yesterday, by the way. You know I don't believe in yesterday. I am only interested in what I am doing now.

If you do the best and the most you can today, don't worry about tomorrow.

If you pay attention to the present, you can improve upon it

Use your time, energy and talents to do the best you can right now. Spend no time wishing it were better

An artist or writer always has to move forward. All the time you're trying to improve yourself, or at least look at ways to improve things or make things better. I'm not really one to harp on previous records. I'm always looking forward to what I'm doing now, and what's ahead.

I'm catching up. I'm satisfied with the show. I think I want to get better and better and keep building. It took a while to figure out how to do it. I didn't know how it was gonna go. I was just like, "I better book a show and just see what happens."

You have to keep being curious. The notion that the present is different than the past, and the future will be different than the present, and the present is past, as we say it. I think I, by nature, am an optimist. Maybe I was driven to escape from my childhood and to be something, create my own world or career the way I wanted it to be. And I keep doing that in very interesting ways.

You just do the best you can. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to get worse the more you do it. It can get better, I think... aspects of it, anyway. I mean, I don't write as much as I used to. But I don't do a lot of things as much as I used to. So that's the natural order of things, too. You're more or less living in the present. You're just trying to get that next song, whatever it is. And not think too much about what happened on the last record, or the record you made 20 years ago, because those are over with. Those are done.

I'm happy with what I'm doing. I try not to focus on how I've changed. I just try to focus on what I'm doing now.

Progress is mediation comes swiftly for those who try their hardest.

The past doesn't define you, your present does. It's okay to create a vision of the future because it affects your behavior in the "now," but don't dwell on past mistakes. Learn from them and focus those lessons in the moment. That's where change can really happen.

With every project you do, you bring out a part of yourself, and it seems to be quite a good way of expanding a person.

I was all about my thoughts, my work, my inspiration. I was always in hair.

For me, what's important is to be inspired and keep moving to grow as an artist and as a person.

You just control what you can control and just hopefully go win games and keep getting better.

I want to see myself in a situation where guys want to grow, guys want to get better.

What I try to do is to look ahead of me and not look back. Whether that's a good thing or bad thing, I'm just focused on trying to get better.

I think it's important how you spend your time. I try to make sure that I'm growing.

Lots of times I'm not crazy about the writing, but I keep moving ahead and somehow it gets better. The important thing is to move forward.

When you create stuff, you're always going to be progressing and where you're at a year down the line, as the creator, it's always going to feel immature. You're going to notice the flaws and the things that you've learned in that year aren't going to be there. So, I think it's important to see stuff as a capture of time - that's what I was doing at that time - and not be ashamed of it. That's how I try to approach music.

No matter how many mistakes you make or how slow you progress, you are still way ahead of everyone who isn't trying.