To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.
JESSE OWENSAlthough I wasn’t invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn’t invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn’t in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
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For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.
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People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.
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It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn’t even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.
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The lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
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I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.
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Hitler didn’t snub me – it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn’t even send me a telegram.
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It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.
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It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere – one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.
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Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.
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The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself – the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us – that’s where it’s at.
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After I came home from the 1936 Olympics with my four medals, it became increasingly apparent that everyone was going to slap me on the back, want to shake my hand or have me up to their suite. But no one was going to offer me a job.
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Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.
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The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.
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Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.
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The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.
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Only by Gods grace have I made it to see today and only by Gods grace will I ever see tomorrow.
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If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.
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I always loved running. It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.
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He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.
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The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
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The road to the Olympics, leads to no city, no country. It goes far beyond New York or Moscow, ancient Greece or Nazi Germany. The road to the Olympics leads — in the end — to the best within us.
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One chance is all you need.
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I had four gold medals, but you can’t eat four gold medals.
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Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.
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