Quotes About Determination

When I was 15 or so, I made a conscious decision to try and sing with a big voice. Everybody I listened to had these big voices, and I wanted to try it. The blessing is that I could.

The sad reality of it is, as black artists in the industry, we still have to work 10 times harder to get our voices out there.

Nobody thought I could do anything with a singing career... except my singing teachers, who were accustomed to hearing voices that could be transformed into something.

I tried to listen to way too many voices in my first stint as a head coach. The second time around, I know what I want and how I want to do it.

Even earlier there were songs where I was not finding appropriate voices, but still I overlooked that and didn't get the perfect voice to sing it. Now I won't do that.

There is a volatile mix, and that's because we're all intense. And there's no denying that.

My mum had always pressed on me to continue my education, and it was just the volatility of sport in terms of not being able to control the result.

I joined the local athletics club when I was 12, that's what I did. I did it of my own volition.

And this we should believe: that hope and volition can bring us closer to our ultimate goal: justice for all, injustice for no-one.

My mentality has always been, If I'm not the best at something, then I might as well be the best at something else. I realized that I wasn't going to be an Olympic volleyball player, but I knew I could model at that level.

Volleyball was the hardest thing I've ever had to do.

When I tell people I'm going to the Olympics, they're like: 'What do you do, track and field? Pole vault? Are you a volleyball player?' No one ever guesses tae kwon do.

There's only one way to prepare for playing beach volleyball, and that's by getting in the sand.

I was supposed to be too short to play college volleyball.

I tried everything from basketball to volleyball to soccer, but dancing was the only thing I never complained about.

Everyone who's great - play any sport, tennis, basketball, football, volleyball, swimming, don't matter, everyone's failed. Everyone's gonna fail. It's how you bounce back.

With 'Brooklyn,' I knew the story I wanted to tell, and I just had a very strong sense that if I turned the volume up a little bit, it could be something really special.

There's a fine line between playing through things and sitting out. I was always on the side of, 'I'm going to play through it.' It's probably good at times, bad at times, but for an athlete to always try to be there and play through things, from a teammate's perspective, it speaks volumes. Now that I look back, mentally it makes you tougher.

Schumacher wouldn't have let him past voluntarily. Of course he did it voluntarily, but he had to do it.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

Man is pre-eminently endowed with the power of voluntarily and consciously determining his own point of view.

When I was in the Army, the unit I served in, you could never stop. It was a volunteer unit, and there was a fairly high rate of attrition. The people who stayed through are the people who were either great at it or the people who just didn't know how to stop. And I fell into that second category.

My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing.

I graduated with a double degree, I speak well, I play two sports at an elite level, I volunteer, I do things the right way - I even got down on my knee to ask my wife to marry me! - and I can't get sponsored? It confuses the hell out of me.