Quotes About Toughness

My whole body is a wreck. I've injured myself so many times with jujitsu, skateboarding, football. I guess I like to live hard.

Ben Askren, he's a tough boy. Golly, he's a tough boy. That's what wrestling does. When you wrestle your whole life, you got to be a tough dude to wrestle.

I got put through a ladder by Jeff Hardy at WrestleMania 23, had bruises from the ladder rungs across my back, but I was back the next night. I did the hardcore match with Mick Foley at WrestleMania 22, went through a flaming table, and had thumbtacks in my back, but I was out there the next night. That mentality does get ingrained in you.

When I was a wrestler, my job was mostly looking mean and throwing punches and kicks.

Football players cannot be wrestlers. Wrestling is a much tougher sport.

Tough wrestlers have never been uncommon. Competing and performing through injuries, enduring crazy travel schedules and wrestling with no offseason just lends itself for one to have to be tough to make it long term and with success in sports-entertainment.

Extreme rules, hardcore wrestling - whatever they want to call it - was born out of a necessity to survive.

Johnny Valentine's the one who said, 'I can't make them believe that wrestling is real, but I can make them believe I'm real.' It would take him forever because he was just stinkingly boring for 30 minutes of the 40-minute match, but he would let people hit him as hard as they could, and he would hit people as hard as he could.

Football is my base; that's where I learned to be tough. I was a strong safety, and that's what I do: I hit people. The mentality is football, the wrestling is precision.

In the '60s and '70s and early '80s, the trainers would grind you, and eventually they would break something - they would break an ankle in ways that it would heal. It was just the way of the business, to ensure that you learned respect for wrestling.

I'm built for wrestling. I have a high pain tolerance. My nose has been broken a couple times. Black eyes.

My two main trainers were John Dahmer and DJ Hyde. DJ Hyde mainly taught me how to be tough: I mean, the beatings that he used to give the students as far as wrestling initiations go were as tough as they come, and I'm thankful for it.

I would love to have gotten into it with Harley Race. He was such a good wrestler and rough and tough. We wrestled at the same time but never each other. And wrestling Sting would have been something I would have enjoyed.

Happy indeed are those to whom nature has given a thick skin and the armour of stoicism!

His generosity was his great strength and his great weakness; he had not enough hands to caress, to embrace, to give; it was the generosity of a creative power, without method and without toughness, which as it were sapped the muscles of his will and almost amounted to a vice.

But getting the mind right when things are not going ideally is the key to athletic excellence. Good perspective in the face of adversity qualifies as "mental toughness" — the coin of the realm for elite athletes.

Hawley had met some tough broads over the years, but they were honed that way from rough living. Mabel was something else. Her hardness was built into her very foundation, and she rammed that hardness into others, like an oil tanker barreling through a fleet of rowboats.

The brothers frowned and strolled toward him. One cracked his neck as he strutted. The other opened and closed fists. Matt felt his blood hum.

It's not an easy course. It's not designed to be. We're not here to get you in touch with your inner child.

Great leaders don't need to act tough. Their confidence and humility serve to underscore their toughness.

No matter how tough the meat may be, it's going to be tender if you slice it thin enough.

I think that's what it is with rock music. It helps you hang tough, I guess.

I come from a tough stock.

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