“An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. Quantity gives experience.”

A life’s work should be based on love.

You have to learn to take rejection not as an indication of personal failing but as a wrong address.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?

You knew the sweetness of now, now, TONIGHT! who cares for tomorrow, tomorrow is nothing, yesterday is over and done, tonight live, tonight!

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

If you learn only methods, you’ll be tied to your methods, but if you learn principles you can devise your own methods.

The minute you get a religion you stop thinking. Believe in one thing too much and you have no room for new ideas.

Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.

Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled.

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.

Teachers are to inspire; librarians are to fulfill.

Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.

If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.

I don’t think the robots are taking over. I think the men who play with toys have taken over. And if we don’t take the toys out of their hands, we’re fools.

I’m an athlete and I’m black, and a lot of black athletes go broke. I do not want to become a statistic, so maybe I overcompensate. But I’m paranoid. Oprah told me a long time ago, ‘You sign every check. Never let anyone sign any checks.’

I’m not used to crying. It’s a little difficult. All my life I’ve had to fight. It’s just another fight I’m going to have to learn how to win, that’s all. I’m just going to have to keep smiling.

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.

I have a big-picture outlook, I am willing to fall, and I understand it’s ok to fall, but I am going to get back up, I may take a step back, but in the end, I am going to take a giant leap forward.

Don’t walk through life just playing football. Don’t walk through life just being an athlete. Athletics will fade. Character and integrity and really making an impact on someone’s life, that’s the ultimate vision, that’s the ultimate goal – bottom line.

Life is about being a versatile athlete and training in all realms of life.

I wish to bring back the legacy that those athletes created on the pitch.

When I step on the field, it’s on. I know it’s time to go to work.