Believe in yourself, not only in swimming, but in life itself. You always have to have fun. You have to have an open mind. If you're not enjoying it, don't do it. Life's too short.
In Romania, of course, gymnastics is among the most popular sports, and my parents had a dream of escaping the Ceausescu regime and giving their child a better life. So they came to the United States and put me in gymnastics.
We need to educate our elite coaches more and have a better approach to teaching the athletes about how to be healthy rather than berate them, humiliate them, use tactics that could scar them for life.
I don't want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the...
No man or woman is an island. To exist just for yourself is meaningless. You can achieve the most satisfaction when you feel related to some greater purpose in life, something greater than yourself.
I have yet to meet anyone quite so stubborn as myself and animated by this overpowering passion that leaves me no time for thought or anything else. I have, in fact, no interest in life outside racing cars.
I try to protect my loved ones, the people I share my life with, because they don't have a public life like me. I want to keep their lives private out of respect for them.
I never doubted my ability, but when you hear all your life you're inferior, it makes you wonder if the other guys have something you've never seen before. If they do, I'm still looking for it.
I had such a wonderful life before drugs and alcohol abuse. I've got that life back now and plan to keep it. Maybe I had to go through what I did to get to this point, to appreciate this life more.
That person has to be accountable for himself. I think that's what we have to do in society today is to be accountable for yourself. I think we have the tendency to always want to live someone else's life.
The hardest thing I had to overcome in life? I think racism. That's so difficult because I don't think anyone can ever understand it. It's not that people don't want to understand it, but they don't want to touch it.
You can go to the pictures or read a book, but football constantly comes back into your mind. It's not a job, it's a life. It takes up your time, thoughts and energy and it can damage relationships with those around you.
There's the typical books, Moby Dick and, I guess in my adult life I began to read biographies more than fiction. I started to want to relate to other people's lives, things that had really happened.
I heard a lot of those things. I heard that I was greedy; that I didn't care about winning; heard the questioning of my loyalty. And I'm thinking: 'Of course I want to win. I've been winning my entire life.'
Quality training is what I do now; before it was a combination of both quality and quantity. Now I'm not trying to be a world-class athlete, I don't need to train at that level. It's about being fit, fit for life.
I am a responsible parent and have always provided for my children. That fact cannot be disputed. I have made mistakes in my life, but failing to care for my children is not one of them.
From the sense of being an ambassador for Jesus Christ, hopefully, through my story and through all the improbables and the miracles that happened in my life, people are inspired or at least a little bit warmer to the idea of exploring who Jesus is.
If I had to think of what I would do different in my whole career, it's that I never would have picked up a beer, bottle of vodka. That definitely changed my life. That is an Achilles' heel for me.
To create and distribute a free encyclopedia of the highest possible quality to every single person on the planet in their own language - That's who I am. That's what I am doing. That's my life goal.
I had to know if I could make it somewhere else. I did not want to go through the rest of my life wondering what might have been without putting myself to the test.
Coach Wooden, when he speaks, you listen. I've taken a lot of things from him and his little blue book because to him, it's not just about basketball, it's about life as well.
