Lance Armstrong Quotes

1. I joined the swim team when I was 12, and I was the worst kid in the pool - I was put with a group of 7-year-olds.


2. Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever. That surrender, even the smallest act of giving up, stays with me. So when I feel like quitting I ask myself: "Which would I rather live with?"

3. I've committed to surfing the rest of my life.


4. Two things scare me. The first is getting hurt. But that's not nearly as scary as the second, which is losing.

5. It's tough to be a 15- or 16-year-old athlete competing around the country. There's tension, there's media. I had no idea what I was getting into.

6. If children have the ability to ignore all odds and percentages, then maybe we can all learn from them. When you think about it, what other choice is there but to hope? We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up, or Fight Like Hell.

7. Marathons are hard because of the physical pain, the pounding on the muscles, joints, tendons.

8. A boo is a lot louder than a cheer. If you have 10 people cheering and one person booing, all you hear is the booing.

9. Obviously, I come from one background, and the people that design fitness equipment have been doing it for years and years, and they know what works and doesn't work.

10. There comes a point in every man's life when he has to say: "Enough is enough."

11. Portland, Oregon won't build a mile of road without a mile of bike path. You can commute there, even with that weather, all the time.

12. The riskiest thing you can do is get greedy.


13. Anyone who imagines they can work alone winds up surrounded by nothing but rivals, without companions. The fact is, no one ascends alone.

14. Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought: "Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody's going down".

15. Knowledge is power, community is strength and positive attitude is everything.

16. Winning is about heart, not just legs. It's got to be in the right place.

17. What ever your 100% looks like, give it.

18. I figure the faster I pedal, the faster I can retire.

19. This is my body, and I can do whatever I want to it. I can push it; Study it; Tweak it; Listen to it. Everybody wants to know what I am on. What am I on? I am on my bike busting my ass six hours a day; What are YOU on?

20. Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary evidence.

21. If there was a god, I'd still have both nuts.

22. If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

23. What is stronger: "Fear or hope?"

24. I still don't get golf.

25. I asked myself what I believed. I had never prayed a lot. I hoped hard, wished hard, but I didn't pray. I had developed a certain distrust of organized religion growing up, but I felt I had the capacity to be a spiritual person, and to hold some fervent beliefs. Quite simply, I believed I had a responsibility to be a good person, and that meant fair, honest, hardworking and honorable. If I did that, if I was good to my family, true to my friends, if I gave back to my community or to some cause, if I wasn't a liar, a cheat, or a thief, then I believed that should be enough. At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized.

26. Nobody needs to cry for me. I'm going to be great.

27. During our lives...we experience so many setbacks, and fight such a hand-to-hand battle with failure, head down in the rain, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope.

28. There's no rule, no law, no regulation that says you can't come back. So I have every right to come back.

29. My mother told me...if you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.

30. Cycling is a sport of the open road and spectators are lining that road.


31. Hard work, sacrifice and focus will never show up in tests.

32. If we don't somehow stem the tide of childhood obesity, we're going to have a huge problem.

33. Hope that is the only antidote to fear.

34. I exercise everyday. I swim, I bike, I run and I go to the gym.

35. Giving up was never an option.

36. For whatever reason, maybe it's because of my story, but people associate Live Strong with exercise and physical fitness, health and lifestyle choices like that.

37. Make an obstacle an opportunity, make a negative a positive.

38. If I can't face my accusers, that's a joke. We did that in medieval times.

39. I believed in belief, for its own shining sake. To believe in the face of utter hopelessness, every article of evidence to the contrary, to ignore apparent catastrophe - what other choice was there? We are so much stronger than we imagine, and belief is one of the most valiant and long-lived human characteristics. To believe, when all along we humans know that nothing can cure the briefness of this life, that there is no remedy for our basic mortality, that is a form of bravery. To continue believing in yourself…believing in whatever I chose to believe in, that was the most important thing. I have been dealing with claims that I cheated and had an unfair advantage in winning my seven Tours since 1999.

40. It can't be any simpler: the farewell is going to be on the Champs-Elysees.

41. When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics. Losing on the other hand, really does say something about who you are. Among other things it measures are: do you blame others, or do you own the loss? Do you analyze your failure, or just complain about bad luck? If you're willing to examine failure, and to look not just at your outward physical performance, but your internal workings, too, losing can be valuable. How you behave in those moments can perhaps be more self-defining than inning could ever be. Sometimes losing shows you for who you really are.

42. It's nice to win. I'll never win again. I may have to take up golf - take on Tiger.








43. I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education.

44. My mom was such a strong character. I don't want to say she was like a man, but she was tough.

45. Suffering, I was beginning to think, was essential to a good life, and as inextricable from such a life as bliss. It's a great enhancer. It might last a minute, but eventually it subsides, and when it does, something else takes its place, and maybe that thing is a great space. For happiness. Each time I encountered suffering, I believed that I grew, and further defined my capacities - not just my physical ones, but my interior ones as well, for contentment, friendship, or any other human experience.

46. But, listen, Eddie Merkyx would have won six Tours if he hadn't been punched.






47. For most of my life I had operated under a simple schematic of winning and losing, but cancer was teaching me a tolerance for ambiguities.

48. Cycling is so hard, the suffering is so intense, that it's absolutely cleansing. The pain is so deep and strong that a curtain descends over your brain…Once; someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. "PLEASURE????" I said. "I don't understand the question." I didn't do it for the pleasure; I did it for the pain.

49. Evan Handler is a man who's looked into the abyss and laughed. His book, "It's Only Temporary", made me laugh along with him. He covers love, lust, showbiz, triumph, and despair - and he manages to be both funny and inspiring about all of it. It's an important book that I think can help to spread goodness around the world. Something we desperately need.


What do you think of Lance Armstrong's quotes?


Feel free to comment and share this blog post if you find it interesting!