Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it and you’ll start believing in it.
I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.
We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.
The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.
The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
Although I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.
One chance is all you need.
A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.
The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.
Hitler didn’t snub me – it was FDR who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.
People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.
He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.
I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.