Second Place Quotes

“There is nothing wrong with second place. Your best effort is all that anyone's asking for. And if you give your best and you come in second, you come in third, you come in last, it's not about winning or losing. It's about giving it everything you've got.”
― Brennan Lee Mulligan

“I said to him that 'second place' pretty much summed up how I felt about myself and my life–that it had been a near miss, requiring just as much effort as victory but with that victory always and forever somehow denied me, by a force that I could only describe as the force of pre-eminence. I could never win, and the reason I couldn't seemed to lie within certain infallible laws of destiny that I was powerless – as the woman I was – to overcome.”
― Rachel Cusk, Second Place

“Freedom from what?” we ask. How about ourselves, because everything is a distant second after that.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Number two becoming number one, that's how life goes. Always demanding the best, that's a strange way of living.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, Evil and the Mask

“In human contests second place is coveted, in nature second place is lunch.”
― Carmine Savastano

“It would have been better to finish 150th than to come so close to winning only to take an L.”
― Gordon Korman, The Unteachables