What counts in the ring is what you can do after you're exhausted. The same is true of life.
Passion makes the old medicine new: Passion lops off the bough of weariness. Passion is the elixir that renews: how can there be weariness when passion is present? Oh, don't sigh heavily from fatigue: seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!
If you get tough mentally, you can get tough physically and overcome fatigue.
If an unusual necessity forces us onward, a surprising thing occurs. The fatigue gets worse up to a certain point, when, gradually or suddenly, it passes away and we are fresher than before!
I do a lot of exercises where I'm so tired that I'm not supposed to do the last rep. What that does is it teaches me that no matter how far I am, how hard I've fallen, I'm never out of the fight. I just take that with me every time I'm in the weight room.
Every now and then, you'll get one of those days when you're feeling rubbish or when you have to pretty much drag yourself out of bed to get to training. But then you'll see the Olympic pool, and all the excitement and adrenaline will come rushing back.
I know I'm tired of thinking about what I should have done yesterday. I know I'm just tired. If I knew what to do with my life, how to fix it up, I would have done it a long time ago. You can't dig that? You think I want to live like I'm somebody's throwaway?
You learned that if you're tired enough, you can sleep sitting up. That the unendurable is perfectly endurable if you just take it a minute at a time, and when the alternative is no more minutes ever.
I had had to learn the difference between the bearable fatigue and the unbearable, the fatigue of fear. The first can be cured by a night's sleep; the second kills.
Now if you are going to win any battle you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired. When you were younger the mind could make you dance all night, and the body was never tired... You've always got to make the mind take over and keep going.
Fight one more round. When your feet are so tired you have to shuffle back to the center of the ring, fight one more round.
All the good stuff is on the other side of tired.
The test of a people is what they can do when they're tired.
When I'm in the gym, different training partners tell me that I've got great conditioning, and I tell them, 'Really? Because, I'm dying here.' I think that I'm just as tired as anyone; I just push myself mentally.
I have more energy at the end than I do at the beginning. You can be so beat up that you can scarcely walk on stage but when you get to the piano the excitement kicks in, you forget about being tired.
The best cure for weariness is the challenge of helping someone who is even more tired.
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
When your brain tells you are done, you are only 40% done.
The fatigue was there, but some people understood that putting it aside was the single most important factor in succeeding.
There's a lot of good waiting for you on the other side of tired. Get yourself tired.
