Michael Mandelbaum Quotes

I'm not the person that when he has an off shooting game is going to make excuses.

Mental strength is really important because you either win or lose in your mind. And I'm not solely talking about sporting matches, boxing events - anything you do, you do it first with your mental strength. And you can actually train and develop it, and I am responsible for what I'm saying because I have experience with that.

Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

You can't get real happy or real depressed when you play baseball. Baseball is a great sport in that it offers a player a lot of opportunities for atonement.

I'm always amazed when a pitcher becomes angry at a hitter for hitting a home run off him. When I strike out, I don't get angry at the pitcher, I get angry at myself. I would think that if a pitcher threw up a home run ball, he should be angry at himself.

More enduringly than any other sport, wrestling teaches self-control and pride. Some have wrestled without great skill - none have wrestled without pride.

Don’t expect to succeed with most of your efforts. Ted Williams, the best baseball hitter of all time, in his best hear only hit 407. He did not succeed 60 percent of the time.

Michael Jordan taught me after our game of one-on-one: A loss is not a failure until you make an excuse. When excuses are no longer an option, you can focus your attention on the job you have to do, and not why it didn't get done.

I've been scoring a lot longer than I haven't been in my life, so I can deal with the ups and downs of it.

Usually if you haven't figured out how you want to play tennis yourself, it is hard to accept the failures of playing five sets.

It takes courage and intelligence, you know, to do the stages of Yoga right, and to start with this Hatha Yoga… It’s just you and nothing but you, standing in one spot frozen like a statue with no place to go for help or excuse or scapegoat except inward.

Surprisingly, it's forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. Researchers have found that taking a self-compassionate point of view on a personal failure makes people more likely to take personal responsibility for the failure than when they take a self-critical point of view. They also are more willing to receive feedback and advice from others, and more likely to learn from the experience.

Baseball is a game of failure. There are plenty of opportunities to be down, or to feel sorry for yourself, or to be upset at somebody or upset at yourself.

Morale is not a single instinct. It has many ingredients. A sense of personal responsibility, the natural courage of an individual, the amount of his acquired self-discipline -- and above all his interest in others -- these together make up the spirit of morale.

I thought I raised a ballplayer. You're nothing but a coward and a quitter.

There is no room on the golf course for anger or self-pity.

The main idea in golf as in life, I suppose is to learn to accept what cannot be altered and to keep on doing one's own reasoned and resolute best whether the prospect be bleak or rosy.

Dark clouds may hang on me sometimes, but I'll work it out.

Golf teaches you honesty. It teaches you discipline. It gives you a strong appreciation of nature. And personal responsibility, something that lacks in our society at times. I mean, it's only your fault, you can't blame anyone else when you shank it. Or pick the wrong club.

I vowed I wouldn't ever let anyone destroy me again. I was going to work at it every day, so hard that I would be the toughest guy in the world. By the end of practice, I wanted to be physically tired, to know that I'd been through a workout. If I wasn't tired, I must have cheated somehow, so I stayed a little longer.

My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in the forest.

In times of hurt and discouragement, it may be consoling for all of us to recall that no one can do anything permanently to us that will last for eternity. Only we ourselves can affect our eternal progression.

Back in my day, which was about a week and a half ago, we took our lumps and we got back up and we cried like babies and quit and then put on weight.

If it works out, it's the best thing in the world. If it doesn't work out, it's like having your heart torn out and chopped up into little pieces while you watch. It leaves a big hollow space that never really heals.

We must not fail, individually, for if we fail, we fail twice - for ourselves and for those who could have been helped, if we had done our duty.