At the end of the day, you're a person before you are a basketball player.
Peace before everything, God before anything,
Love before anything, real before everything,
Home before any place, shoot before anything,
Style and state radiate, Love Power slay the hate.
Someone was hurt before you, wronged before you, hungry before you, frightened before you, beaten before you, humiliated before you, raped before you... yet, someone survived... You can do anything you choose to do.
Before you speak, listen. Before you write, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you invest, investigate. Before you criticize, wait. Before you pray, forgive. Before you quit, try. Before you retire, save. Before you die, give.
I was a man who played basketball and after I played basketball and before I played basketball I was going to be a psychologist, whereas most people who play their occupation is their definition - and then when they stop doing who they are, they become nothing.
The day before is what we bring to the day we're actually living through, life is a matter of carrying along all those days-before just as someone might carry stones, and when we can no longer cope with the load, the work is done, the last day is the only one that is not the day before another day.
The love of basketball, the time and effort I've put into it - I'd be doing a disservice to myself if I didn't see how far I could go in basketball before I tried to do anything in baseball.
What I am is a humanist before anything - before I'm a Jew, before I'm black, before I'm a woman. And my beliefs are for the human race - they don't exclude anyone.
If you put it in perspective, I loved basketball before I loved everything else, you know what I mean? Before I had a girlfriend or even childhood friends, I had my basketball. So it's my first love.
I was playing basketball at Lifetime Fitness every day for two hours. Like, I played an hour of basketball before I played David Ferrer in the semi-final.
When it came to basketball, I was a fanatic. I started to focus solely on basketball the summer before my freshman year in high school. I worked on my shooting in the driveway, drawing up charts where I recorded each day's performance. I spent hours working alone on ball-handling. I ran five miles a day and played games against my friends.
Soon it will be daybreak. Soon the day will break. I can't stop it from breaking in the same way it always does, and then from lying there broken; always the same day, which comes around again like clockwork. It begins with the day before the day before, and then the day before, and then it's the day itself. A Saturday. The breaking day. The day the butcher comes.
My family is definitely the most important thing for me, before anything. Basketball, everything.
Whether it's boxing, basketball, or badminton, one must be ready to succeed before entering the arena...long before the lights come up.
They had...finished their lives before their death - which is not always the end of life and often comes long before the end.
A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.