Audre Lorde Quotes

You have to believe in yourself. You have to believe there's a reason you're trying to pursue the highest levels you can go. That's because you can do it and you can do it well and you can do it better than anybody else.

Progress is personal; it comes from individuals demanding more of themselves and everyone else.

Excellence means when a man or woman asks of himself more than others do.

You have to decide that you will be the best.

Life gives to all the choice. You can satisfy yourself with mediocrity if you wish. You can be common, ordinary, dull, colorless, or yyou can channel your life so that it will be clean, vibrant, useful, progressive, colorful, and rich.

The man without a purpose is a man who drifts at the mercy of random feelings or unidentified urges and is capable of any evil, because he is totally out of control of his own life. In order to be in control of your life, you have to have a purpose-a productive purpose.

Effort is between you, and you, and nobody else. So that team that thinks it's ready to see you, they think what they've seen on film, they ain't saw what film shows, because every day is a new day. Every moment is a new moment. So now you've got to go out and show them that I'm a different creature now, than I was five minutes ago, cause I'm pissed off for greatness. Cause if you ain't pissed off for greatness, that just means you're okay with being mediocre, and ain't no man in here okay with just basic.

You drift through life and let things happen to you, or go by design and say, 'This is what I'm intended to do.' The Bible is very clear that God has a purpose. But even if I know that purpose, I can't fulfill it if I'm out of shape.

On our track to success, we have to fight the tendency to look at others and see how far they've come. The only thing that counts is how we use the potential we possess and that we run our race to the best of our abilities.

Mature striving is linked to long-range goals. Thus, the process of becoming is largely a matter of organizing transitory impulses into a pattern of striving and interest in which the element of self-awareness plays a large part.

Character is just another word for having a perfectly disciplined and educated will. A person can make his own character by blending these elements with an intense desire to achieve excellence. Everyone is different in what I will call magnitude, but the capacity to achieve character is still the same.

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

I've always been my own hitting coach.

One characteristic of winners is they always look upon themselves as a do it yourself project.

Long-term, we must begin to build our internal strengths. It isn't just skills like computer technology. It's the old-fashioned basics of self-reliance, self-motivation, self-reinforcement, self-discipline, self-command.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

Whatever it is you're doing, whether it's your career or a particular focus, if you're trying to be the best you can possibly be, then you'll be putting that pressure on yourself.

The only pressure I feel is the pressure I put on myself to win.

You are only limited to what you push yourself to, you know? You can always get better.

I try to practice with my life.

You can become an even more excellent person by constantly setting higher and higher standards for yourself and then by doing everything possible to live up to those standards.

Other people may not have had high expectations for me... but I had high expectations for myself.

The only pressure I'm under is the pressure I've put on myself.