Athlete Quotes - Page 24

Sport, at its best, at its most human, is able to inspire an innocence and joy that is unique to each of us.

What I can tell them is the way you become an Olympic champion is to start working now. I tell them why it's always worth it to put the time and effort into something you want to be good at.

I play because I have fun, if I don't have fun on the court, there is something wrong. I am just a 19 year old boy that likes to do what he likes, nothing else.

We should try to teach the young people values that are useful to them whether they become professional athletes or not.

I had no natural gift to be anything - not an athlete, not an actor, not a writer, not a director, a painter of garden porches - not anything. So I've worked really hard, because nothing ever came easily to me.

I don't see myself as disabled. There's nothing I can't do that able-bodied athletes can do.

Great champions have an enormous sense of pride. The people who excel are those who are driven to show the world and prove to themselves just how good they are.

You can't put a limit anything.

I squirm when I see athletes praying before a game. Don't they realize that if God took sports seriously he never would have created George Steinbrenner.

American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.

It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one - not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses - ever makes it alone.

Each great athlete must some day bow to that perennial old champion, Father Time, even as I, for Time eventually wins.

Don't tell me how rocky the sea is, just bring the ship in.

As a young girl, I just wanted to have fun and compete. There were no goals of becoming an Olympic athlete. I wanted to hang out with my friends. I wanted to do something fun, and that's what I did

Reading for writers is like training for athletes.

Tonight was not about winning, it was about focusing on myself and what I was aiming to do. It's the reason why I was able to swim so well

Recently I donated money to the establishment of the Muhammad Ali Foundation in Louisville. I regard that as a kind of payback. He smoothed the way for us. He wasn’t just a great person who had conviction, but made the sport of boxing great. He was the first superstar, he made our stock rise. Without him we wouldn’t have earned so much. Americans from every walk of life have contributed to the foundation: Bill Clinton, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt. Unfortunately I was the only American athlete to make a donation. There’s not enough respect in our business.

I think the biggest thing for all athletes is recovery - being able to bounce back from week to week, practice to practice, to come back in top form.

Life to me is a series of false limits and my challenge as an athlete is to explore those limits

I have never doped … I have competed as an endurance athlete for 25 years with no spike in performance, passed more than 500 drug tests and never failed one.

Being an athlete, you know how to train and prepare your body for a performance and you're able to do it under pressure.

Jackie Robinson, as an athlete and as someone who was trying to make a stand for equality, he was exemplary.

The athlete who says that something can't be done should never interrupt the one who's doing it

Don't live vicariously through your kids or try to shape them into who you wanted to be, like the popular kid or an athlete. Children should be given the opportunity to be themselves.

The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred's ear.