“If I don’t ask “Why me?” after my victories, I cannot ask “Why me?” after my setbacks and disasters.”

Later, I discovered there was a lot of work to being good in tennis.

I have become convinced that we blacks spend too much time on the playing field and too little time in libraries.

I don’t want to be remembered for my tennis accomplishments.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

We must believe in the power of education. We must respect just laws. We must love ourselves, our old and or young, our women as well as our men.

A couple of times a day I sit quietly and visualize my body fighting the AIDS virus. It’s the same as me sitting and seeing myself hit the perfect serve. I did that often when I was an athlete.

When we were together, I loved you deeply and you gave me so much happiness I can never repay you.

One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.

Life is like a tennis game. You can’t win without serving.

I spent many, many hours in libraries. Libraries became courts of last resort, as it were.

Wherever I am when you feel sick at heart and weary of life, or when you stumble and fall and don’t know if you can get up again, think of me. I will be watching and smiling and cheering you on.

I take the good with the bad, and I try to face them both with as much calm and dignity as I can muster.

We must reach out our hand in friendship and dignity both to those who would befriend us and those who would be our enemy.

The ideal attitude is to be physically loose and mentally tight.

In America you’re conditioned to regard everything as a contest. You have to make the Ten Best Dressed List, win this, win that. It drives me nuts sometimes. Who cares, for Christ’s sake?

One’s only rival is one’s own potentialities. One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities. In this sense, every man can be a king, and must therefore be treated like a king.

Of course this chattering diary is a facade, the literary equivalent of the everyday smiling face which hides the inward ravages of jealousy, remorse, fear and the consciousness of irretrievable moral failure. Yet such pretenses are not only consolations but may even be productive of a little ersatz courage.

In any given moment we have two options: to step forward into growth or to step back into safety.

I found myself highly critical of any leader who failed to lead by example.

Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.

Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure.

You know, that might be the answer – to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.

In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental.