Athletics Quotes

Finland has produced so many brilliant distance runners because back home it costs $2.50 a gallon for gas.

You have to be positive, and I'm not just talking about athletics, this also applies to life.

In no other profession does the character and personality of a director play a more vital role in the development of young people than in the coaching of athletics.

Eakins rejected gentlemen athletics as his theme. Instead, he took a subject that had been the stuff of illustrated weeklies and the penny press and turned it into fine art. Eakins celebrates not fire from heaven but honest sweat, not genius but hard work.

All athletes speak about the mental element of athletics, and it usually boils down to the same thing: if you can remove your ego from the game, you can function with much more clarity and you are more likely to succeed. Wouldn't it be interesting if we all began speaking about the mental element of our lives in this way?

The mastery of the true self, and the refusal to permit others to dominate us, is the ultimate in living and self-expression in athletics.

It is easier to develop the mind through meditation than it is just through athletic practice. If you put the two together, it will be unbelievable.

Any good athletic is always in a state of perpetual training, as is the Zen student.

In my heart of hearts my motivation would always have been to be the best, and I think that athletics is probably what I was built for.

There are a lot of things that can be learned from the darker corners of athletics. You have doctors who view bodybuilders as cavalier amateurs of science. And then you have the bodybuilders who view the doctors as too conservative to do anything interesting. So I've tried to become the middleman for putting some of those pieces together.

Few would deny that blacks have become very dominant in athletics: football, basketball, track, now dominant in tennis and dominant in golf.

Athletics keeps us healthy, gets us up and running around. It also gives you an opportunity to meet a lot of different people, which is very important.

I was focused on athletics, outdoors, sports.

In order to succeed on the athletic field, it is necessary to succeed in daily life. Your spirit and your life must be perfectly trimmed for the chi to flow properly.

Nothing good comes in life or athletics unless a lot of hard work has preceded the effort. Only temporary success is achieved by taking short cuts.

Football, that's just athletics. But in the business world - doing everything - people are competing. So you need good work ethics, and I think it helped me to develop good work ethics, being in a small town.

For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art.

In athletics there's always been a willingness to cheat if it looks like you're not cheating. I think that's just a quirk of human nature.

Because I just like sports, I like athletics and I like competition.

The biggest concern with female athletes is they don't naturally compete. And so I think a part of what we do here exceptionally well that separates us from other programs is we train them to compete. So a huge challenge in women's athletics is to get them to compete against their teammates and friends in practice with the same intensity they compete with their bitter rivals. So that's a huge challenge for me, to get the women in practice to go after each other the way you would a rival

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.

When I race my mind is full of doubts - who will finish second, who will finish third?

A trophy carries dust. Memories last forever.

My thoughts before a big race are usually pretty simple. I tell myself: Get out of the blocks, run your race, stay relaxed. If you run your race, you'll win... channel your energy. Focus.

There is no such thing as life in-between.

If you don't have confidence, you'll always find a way not to win.

There are only two options regarding commitment; you’re either in or you’re out.

Run when you can, walk if you have to, crawl if you must; just never give up.

If the chi is being wasted by useless activities, emotions and associations that drain us, then we don't have enough power when it comes time to perform.

I think that there’s too much sugar in the world and not enough salt. Kids want to be challenged. Humans want to aspire to something. You don’t win in life and you don’t win in athletics with softness or selfishness.

Bear in mind, people with eating disorders tend to be both competitive and intelligent. We are incredibly perfectionistic. We often excel in school,athletics,artistic pursuits. We also tend to quit without warning. Refuse to go to school,drop out,quit jobs,leave lovers,move,lose all our money. We get sick of being impressive. Rather,we tire of having to seem impressive. As a rule,most of us never really believed we were any good in the first place.

Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

We do believe in setting goals. We live by goals. In athletics we always have a goal. When we go to school, we have the goal of graduation and degrees. Our total existence is goal-oriented. We must have goals to make progress, encouraged by keeping records . . . as the swimmer or the jumper or the runner does . . . Progress is easier when it is timed, checked, and measured. . . .Goals are good. Laboring with a distant aim sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain.

One or two of my friends set longevity records for people who had AIDS. What they did, incredibly hard though it was, was to practice meditation, positive thinking and they worked out physically quite a bit.

Several very good friends of mine have died of AIDS. I spent a great deal of time with them when they went through that process.

Coming from a farming background, I saw nothing out of the ordinary in running barefoot, although it seemed to startle the rest of the athletics world. I have always enjoyed going barefoot and when I was growing up I seldom wore shoes, even when I went into town.

In the West, we think of sports and athletics as individual achievement, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; it all revolves around the ego. This has nothing to do with the Zen of sports and athletics.

A sport has its own built-in integrity, doesn't need an artificial one. Athletics carries its own set of truths, and those truths are diminished and manipulated by people with agendas.

People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.

In running it is man against himself, the cruelest of opponents. The other runners are not the real enemies. His adversary lies within him, in his ability with brain and heart to master himself and his emotions.

Those who are already adept at some disciplines of the body will find that the study of Zen and meditation will give you much more control than you now have.

The chi is the central energy or power that we use in physical expression. When the chi is flowing properly in our lives, we can be very adept athletically.

If someone else runs faster than you or makes more money than you or is more adept at anything, that doesn't mean you have lost. You are measuring yourself only against yourself and your tendencies not to do all that you are capable of doing.

The glory of sport comes from dedication, determination and desire. Achieving success and personal glory in athletics has less to do with wins and losses than it does with learning how to prepare yourself so that at the end of the day, whether on the track or in the office, you know that there was nothing more you could have done to reach your ultimate goal.

I'm not interested in athletics, I'm only interested in achievement. Fix your goal and work for it.

Keep your dreams alive. Understand to achieve anything requires faith and belief in yourself, vision, hard work, determination, and dedication. Remember all things are possible for those who believe.

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

It was an accident, although I've been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child - in school, music, athletics. To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.

The institutions of college athletics exist primarily as unreality fueled by deceit. The unreality is that universities should be in the business of providing large spectacles of mass entertainment. The fundamental absurdity of that notion requires the promulgation of the various deceits necessary to carry it out.

You find out a lot about yourself through athletics. If you're cut out to be a winner or a failure or a quitter, athletics will bring it out of you. You're always stripping yourself down to the bones of your personality. And sometimes you just get a glimpse of the kind of talent you've been given. Sometimes I run and I don't even feel the effort of running. I don't even feel the ground. I'm just drifting. Incredible feeling. All the agony and frustration, they're all justified by one moment like that.