A Quote by Frederick Lenz

In the West, we think of sports and athletics as individual achievement, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat; it all revolves around the ego. This has nothing to do with the Zen of sports and athletics.

Frederick Lenz

Quote Topics

Achievement Agony Around Athletics Defeat Ego Individual Individual Achievement Nothing Revolves Sports Think Thrill Victory West Zen

Quote Author

Frederick Lenz
American - Author
February 9, 1950 - April 12, 1998

If you look at the coverage of female sports and athletics across any of the broadcasters that participate in league rights and/or sports programming, women are underrepresented, and it's a chance and an opportunity for Lifetime to support that movement and the importance of athletics and competition for girls and women.

Nancy Dubuc

All success in sports and athletics, from the Zen point of view, comes from the mind. No matter what kind of shape your body is in, there is disharmony in the being.

Frederick Lenz

If you have the sense of participation in sports or athletics, of being a player, then you are not really into the Zen mind. In Zen mind there is no sense of self in the play.

Frederick Lenz

I've always thought that my exposure to competitive sports helped me a great deal in the operating room. It teaches you endurance, and it teaches you how to cope with defeat, and with complications of all sort. I think I'm a well-coordinated person, more than average, and I think that came through my interest in sports, and athletics... Playing basketball you have to make decisions promptly, and that's true in the operating room as well.

Denton Cooley

In the Zen of sports and athletics, we seek to bring discipline and control into our physical movements, but at the same time to eliminate the self that gets in the way of perfect play.

Frederick Lenz

Sports and athletics can be a path in Zen, in concordance with daily practice of zazen meditation. You need to move with your spirit, not just with your body.

Frederick Lenz

A hard-fought, well-fought, hairline-close game is as classical in sports as tragedy is in the theater. Victory is contained within defeat, and defeat is contained within victory. That's the way it is in the best of games. What counts in sports is not the victory, but the magnificence of the struggle.

Joe Paterno

I was focused on athletics, outdoors, sports.

Joe Namath

Two decades in athletics is a long time in sports.

P. T. Usha

It's a crazy world, so sports and athletics and music can be a form of escapism.

Eddie Vedder

There is certainly an underrepresentation of Asian Pacific Islanders in professional sports/athletics.

Nathan Adrian

The study of motivation goes back to the Greeks. Their sports were essential to their education. They saw in sports the integration of body, mind and soul, the creation of beauty, the mastering of athletics, and the challenge of competition. A French sociologist points this out. "Sports," he wrote, was part of the education of the citizen. He was expected to engage in exercise for a whole series of reasons that had to do with the shaping of the citizen; the relation between moral good and physical good; and the growth of a person.

George A. Sheehan

The thrill of victory in business blows away the thrill of victory in sports. Business is a sport 24/7/365.

Mark Cuban

David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon.