Quotes About Adversity

When you're about to get married, and then you're not, it's all a big shock. You think, 'Well, okay, so I'm never going to lead a totally conventional life now.'

What really interests me is how a woman who has had a bad experience with a man comes through it and gets a new life. I feel you have to be positive. You have to say, 'Look, okay, he's ditched you, but there's life after.'

Think about finding out when you're 13 that your dad is not your dad. It's like, okay, take it on the chin and keep going. No choice, really.

If you are not making any mistakes, you are being excessively risk-averse. Investing involves risk, and that means you will occasionally be wrong. And although it is okay to be wrong, it is not okay to stay wrong.

Life shows us all the time, really and truly, that you're not in control of most things, but at the same time, the things that you are able to control, you should definitely hold on to that. But it's okay that you can't control every aspect of your life.

It's okay to fail if you learn from it.

I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.

I had a lot of chaos in my very early years before I was old enough to know what was going on, and then I just skated through the rest of my childhood without dealing with it.

I grew up in a household where I learned five things from my old man. You know what they were? You're no good. You're a failure. You're not going to amount to anything. Don't trust nobody, and don't tell nobody your business. When I lost to Larry Holmes in 1982, I felt all five of those things smacked me right across the face.

I was born with chronic asthma, and when I was about five or six years old, one day I had an asthma attack so bad I began to become comatose.

My father wasn't around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, 'Why me? Why don't I have a father? Why isn't he around? Why did he leave my mother?' But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, 'I don't know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?'

When I got older, it got harder because when kids get older, they get meaner, so I went through a lot of bullying and people calling me, like, 'zebra' or 'cow,' so it was really hard growing up.

I think everything that played a part in my life growing up is in my music. Being homeless, living in shelters, dealing with over-aged, older men that hit on me... all that is in the music.

I remember, I was at the house with my oldest son and I got that call from Johnny Ace. You know that call. Johnny was the guy that hired me, fired me and hired me back, which was kind of cool. But I was just fired, everything stopped, my whole world stopped.

It was not about the guy who could jump the furthest; it was about the guy who could jump the furthest on that particular day in the worst conditions of any Olympic long jump final.

Calzaghe and Mayweather both got booed in the early part of their careers and look where they are now. I'm used to it, though, in the Olympic final I got booed by the Cubans and the Chinese so I'm ready to deal with it, do what I do and beat what is in front of me.

And in nineteen seventy two I almost wasn't, on the team, but I knew about it just before Olympic Games for three months before this why this is was not very good for me. I'd been ready to go, you know.

I'd love to be in the Olympics and face Felix Savon again. But if I can't, I'll make the best of it. Life ain't over.

If I break my ankle right now, this Olympics wasn't meant to be.

I damaged my hamstring at the London Olympics and had to stop training for five months. At times, I thought my career was over.

One thing I learned from the '88 Olympics: It's not a question of if they can screw you over: it's a question of if they will. It's not the gold medal they took away from me. The medal doesn't mean anything. It's that they said I lost. That experience is well and alive in my mind.

On the street, I'll hear, 'You made the Olympics for me,' or 'I love what you represented.' Only occasionally is it, 'You were a flop, an also-ran, a loser.'

At the Olympics, for those eight minutes of each fight, all that attention was on me. Either the crowd is with you or against you.

Being injured has harmed me on and off the field in a lot of ways.