Top 208 Quotes & Sayings by Lance Armstrong - Page 3

It's something I find enjoyable. Whether it is a road bike or mountain bike or tandem bike. I enjoy riding a bike.

At least I didn't invent a dead girlfriend

If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it's patience.

How many times do I have to say it? … Well, it can't be any clearer than 'I've never taken drugs.'

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.

I want to finish by saying that I intend to be an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer once I have beaten the disease. I want this to be a positive experience and I want to take this opportunity to help others who might someday suffer from the same circumstance I face today.

If a script writer had come up with a story resembling what you have just achieved, even the Hollywood studios would have refused.

The unwillingness to accept anything short of victory, that underlying fury, is the fundamental building block of my bottomless motivation to succeed. It is my credo in all that I do in life from battling cancer to bicycle racing.

What ever your 100% looks like, give it.

The way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice you make every single day when you wake up. It's yours to decide.

There were something like 50 good, arduous climbs around Nice, solid inclines of ten miles or more. The trick was not to climb every once in awhile, but to climb repeatedly. I would do three different climbs in one day, over the course of a six- or seven-hour ride. A 12 mile climb took about an hour, so that tells you what my days were like.

So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it's meant to improve us.

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. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven. If so, I was going to reply, You know what? You're right. Fine.

Me and running don’t always see eye to eye. Some days it hurts more than others. But it doesn’t mean I don’t do it. I deal with it and I keep running because not everything that is good for you, always feels good for you.

My greatest point is my persistence... However down I am, I fight until the last ball.

It gave me a chance to re-evaluate my life and my career. Cancer certainly gives things a new perspective. I would not have won the Tour de France if I had not had cancer. It gave me new strength and focus.

What athletes do may not be that healthy, the way we push our bodies completely over the edge to the degrees that are not human. I've said all along that I will not live as long as the average person.

I have never doped. I can say it again, but I've said it for seven years.

People refer to 'the good ol' days', but I don't know what they're talking about. As someone who's battled cancer, if I lived more than 20 years ago, I'd be a dead man.

On a friendship with former president George W. Bush: He's a personal friend, but we've all got the right not to agree with our friends.

My career is going to be played out year by year. Will I be here in 2004? I don't know. The record won't keep me here. Happiness will.

It's a fact that children with cancer have higher cure rates than adults with cancer, and I wonder if the reason is their natural, unthinking bravery... Adults know too much about failure; they're more cynical and resigned and fearful.

I didn't just jump back on the bike and win. There were a lot of ups and downs, good results and bad results, but this time I didn't let the lows get to me.

The question was, which would the chemo kill first: the cancer or me?

Hope that is the only antidote to fear.

The Europeans look down on raising your hands. They don't like the end-zone dance. I think that's unfortunate. That feeling - the finish line, the last couple of meters - is what motivates me.

It's a great feeling when someone like Bernard Hinault comes up to you on the podium to say 'Welcome to the club

We sped on, across the plains, toward Metz. I hung back, saving myself. It is called the Race of Truth. The early stages separate the strong riders from the weak. Now the weak would be eliminated altogether.

To all the cynics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't believe in miracles. This is a great sporting event and hard work wins it.

You can teach someone how to control their strength, but you can't teach them to be strong.

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.

I can get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror and my family can look at me too and that's all that matters.

Nineteen hundred meters up there is completely different from1,900 any place else. There's no air, there's no oxygen. There's no vegetation, there's no life. There's no life. Rocks. Any other climb there's vegetation, grass and trees. Not there on the Ventoux. It's more like the moon than a mountain.

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.

My cocktail, so to speak, was only EPO, but not a lot, transfusions and testosterone.

I've given gifts in the Tour de France and it's come back to bit me. So no gifts.

The idea that anybody was forced, or pressured, or encouraged, is not true.

I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.

I'm not willing to put a percentage on the chances but I will no longer rule it out.

There were no shortcuts, I realized. It took years of racing to build up the mind and body and character until a rider had logged hundreds of races and thousands of miles of road. I wouldn't be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain and Heart.

How do you fight an invisible opponent like suspicion?

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.

Nobody wants to hear how I think I've been mistreated, or how I think my punishment should be lifted, or tweaked, or reduced. Nobody wants to hear me say that, nobody cares what I think about this. I get it.

I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles.

We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.

For 15 years I was a complete arsehole to a dozen people. I said I would try and make it right with those people, and anybody that gave me an audience, I was there.

I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people.

You know what they say, the high trees get the wind.

When you know your not going to die, you have to ask yourself... What's the highest and best use for myself.

Cancer taught me a plan for more purposeful living, and that in turn taught me how to train and to win more purposefully. It taught me that pain has a reason, and that sometimes the experience of losing things-whether health or a car or an old sense of self-has its own value in the scheme of life. Pain and loss are great enhancers.

A bicycle is the long-sought means of transportation for all of us who have runaway hearts.

I don't think anybody else from my generation had federal agents standing at their door with a badge and a gun, saying: 'You are going to answer my questions'.

Regardless of one victory, two victories, four victories, there's never been a victory by a cancer survivor. That's a fact that hopefully I'll be remembered for.

A bike ride. Yes, that's it! A simple bike ride. It's what I love to do and most days I can't believe they pay me to do it. A day is not the same without it.

Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

Losing and dying: it's the same thing.

I love this race from the very depths of my heart. It gives me motivation and it transcendsme like nothing else in the world.

There was more happiness in the process, in the build, in the preparation. The winning was almost phoned in.

Made plenty of mistakes along the way - all of which I am truly sorry.

In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.