I'm a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of
it. Thomas Jefferson
I just told myself I wanted to do it how I do it all the time.
Fabian Dorfler on the way he tackled the final to become World
Champion.
HARD? It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't
hard, everyone would do it. The HARD is what makes it great.
Coach Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks) in A League of Their Own in response to Dottie (Geena Davis) saying she's quitting the team because "it just got too hard"
To be a great champion, you must believe that you are the best. If you're not, pretend you are.
Muhammad Ali
"...on mastering the first ever triple jump: He wanted to prove to himself that he could do it. He said,
'If you can do it in your sleep or in practice, that's not doing it. I had to do it in some sort of performance
level -- I wanted to prove that I could do it.'"
Dick Button, 1948 & 1952 Olympic Figure skating Gold medalist from Eureka by John Naber
"If we play them ten times, they'll
probably win nine. But not tonight. Tonight is our time."
Coach Herb Brooks in Miracle
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Aristotle
Many great athletes prepare for competition through visualization. And many of the great feats of history have been accomplished first through visualization. Sir Edmund Hillary, the first person to scale the heights of Mount Everest, was asked by a young reporter how it felt to be the first man to touch the peak of Everest. Hillary replied that it felt exactly the same as each of the previous times. What the puzzled reporter failed to see is that Hillary had already successfully scaled Everest many times through visualization.
I never let my schooling get in the way of my education. Mark Twain
He who has never failed somewhere, that man cannot be great. Herman Melville
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
"The most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well." Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics.
May the countryside and gliding valley streams content me. Lost to fame let me love river and woodland. Virgil
The sounding cataract haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, the mountain and the deep and gloomy wood, their colors and their forms were then to me an appetite; A feeling and a love that had no need of a remoter charm, by thought supplied nor any interest unborrowed from the eye. William Wordsworth
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god - sullen, untamed and intractable. T.S. Eliot
You can observe a lot by just watching. Yogi Berra
Lance Armstrong's Winning Secrets Men's Journal February 2005
Eric Heiden 25: An exclusive interview USOC February 2005
People acting together as a group can accomplish things which no individual
acting alone could ever hope to bring about. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Bogart: "How'd you like it?" Hepburn: "Like it?"
Bogart: "Whitewater rapids!" Hepburn: "I never dreamed..."
Bogart: "I don't blame you for being scared - not one little bit. Nobody with good sense ain't scared of
whitewater."
Hepburn: "I never dreamed that any mere physical experience
could be so stimulating."
- The African Queen
