Your mind is your invisible talisman. The letters PMA (positive mental attitude) are emblazoned on one side, and NMA (negative mental attitude) on the other. These are powerful forces.
A man on a thousand mile walk has to forget his goal and say to himself every morning, 'Today I'm going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.
A man's greatest battles are the ones he fights within himself.
Courage is being scared to death... and saddling up anyway.
The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides the champion from someone else who is not a champion. That's what most people lack, having the guts to go on and just say they'll go through the pain no matter what happens.
I've never been lonely. I've been in a room... I've felt suicidal, I've been depressed. I've felt awful ... awful beyond all , but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me...or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I've never been bothered with because I've always had this terrible itch for solitude.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity.
So, you've got a problem? That's good! Why? Because repeated victories over your problems are the rungs on your ladder of success. With each victory, you grow in wisdom, stature and experience. You become a better, bigger, more successful person each time you meet a problem and tackle and conquer it with a positive mental attitude.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Say you’re running and you think, ‘Man, this hurts, I can’t take it anymore. The ‘hurt’ part is an unavoidable reality, but whether or not you can stand anymore is up to the runner himself.
The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.'
It is cowardice to commit suicide.
Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.
Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed and you haven't been.
There is a strange fact about the human mind, a fact that differentiates the mind sharply from the body. The body is limited in ways that the mind is not. One sign of this is that the body does not continue indefinitely to grow in strength and develop in skill and grace. By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons' bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain. The mind does not stop growing at any particular age.
I've made game-winners, I've missed game-winners. I've pitched shutouts, and I've given up 10 runs. You just deal with the experiences and learn how to get over the bad outings and learn from them, so they don't occur time and time again. You take what you did right from the good games and turn those into, 'How do I repeat that success?'
When you are failing, you are forced to be creative, to dig deep and think, night and day.
When you go through a tournament of seven games, there are peaks and valleys. You kind of ride the players that are hot.
No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking.
Nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature to bear. The same things happen to another, and either because he does not see that they have happened or because he would show a great spirit he is firm and remains unharmed. It is a shame then that ignorance and conceit should be stronger than wisdom.
If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.
Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul.
Become strong again in spirit, strong in will, strong in endurance, strong to bear all sacrifices
It's hard to be so mentally competitive and when you're not competing you try to turn it off but it doesn't work like that. I don't think you can just turn it off, I think you still find ways to be competitive - if it's playing a video game, if it's playing cards.
