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.
JESSE OWENSLife doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.
More Jesse Owens Quotes
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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.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
I fought, I fought harder, but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.
JESSE OWENS -
The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred’s ear.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.
JESSE OWENS -
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.
JESSE OWENS -
We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn’t have steak? Who had steak?
JESSE OWENS -
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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One chance is all you need.
JESSE OWENS -
The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.
JESSE OWENS -
I decided I wasn’t going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.
JESSE OWENS