Haruki Murakami Quotes

The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one's own person, utterly and completely.

I run because it's so symbolic of life. You have to drive yourself to overcome the obstacles. You might feel that you can't. But then you find your inner strength, and realize you're capable of so much more than you thought.

The real purpose of running isn't to win a race, it's to test the limits of the human heart.

Discipline is something we despise for the moment.... We all look for a place to run, an excuse with which to stall. No one enjoys it. Yet those of us who have endured it know that the fruit it produces and the pain from which it ultimately spares us makes it worth the agony.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.

It's what I've learned over the years that has pushed me beyond limits.

I always pushed myself. Whenever I felt I needed to stop, I made myself run faster.

It wasn't until my late twenties that I learned that by working out I had given myself a great gift. I learned that nothing good comes without work and a certain amount of pain. When I finish a set that leaves me shaking, I know more about myself. When something gets bad, I know it can't be as bad as that workout.

In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.

Do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty.

The true hero is flawed. The true test of a champion is not whether he can triumph, but whether he can overcome obstacles - preferably of his own making - in order to triumph.

Being a successful person is not necessarily defined by what you have achieved, but by what you have overcome.

Each struggle, each defeat, sharpens your skills and strengths, your courage and your endurance, your ability and your confidence.

The spirit, the will to win, and the will to excel are the things that endure. These qualities are so much more important than the events that occur.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

One thing I've come to learn about myself is that I have to keep going.

You take yourself to a place where you've got absolutely nothing left and then you find out you have to push yourself one more step. That's a tough place to be in.

When we tackle obstacles, we find hidden reserves of courage and resilience we did not know we had. And it is only when we are faced with failure do we realise that these resources were always there within us. We only need to find them and move on with our lives.

We are different, in essence, from other men. If you want to win something, run 100 meters. If you want to experience something, run a marathon.

The purpose of training is to tighten up the slack, toughen the body, and polish the spirit.

What we face may look insurmountable. But I learned something from all those years of training and competing. I learned something from all those sets and reps when I didn't think I could lift another ounce of weight. What I learned is that we are always stronger than we know.

I want to keep pushing my boundaries. One of the biggest things I learned from 'Unbroken' is that you can go a lot further than you think you can. We often underestimate our actual capabilities.

The will to challenge myself is strong, but I think that's growing, the desire to stretch myself and make it hard.

It's so important that you are constantly moving. And when things are hard, it will just make you fight harder - that's what you need to develop as a person, I think.

The fight game has never been just about winning.