George A. Sheehan Quotes

Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.

The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you've got.

Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.

Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.

Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.

Listen to your body. Do not be a blind and deaf tenant.

The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit

The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.

Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.

I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.

To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner.

There is nothing more certain than the defeat of the man who gives up.

Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.

Exercise: you don't have time not to

I have found my hero and he is me.

The most important thing I learned [from running] is that there is only one runner in this race, and that is me.

Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.

We may think there is willpower involved, but more likely... change is due to want power. Wanting the new addiction more than the old one. Wanting the new me in preference to the person I am now.

Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me.

The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.

Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.

I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.

Running makes you an athlete in all areas of life...trained in the basics, prepared for whatever comes, ready to fill each hour and deal with the decisive moment.

Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.

No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life's most rewarding experiences.

Exercise is done against one's wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.

There are as many reasons for running as there are days in a year.... But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child.

Have you ever felt worse after a run?

Every runner is an experiment of one.

If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you'd best begin with the Little Answers about your body.

Once you have decided that winning isn't everything, you become a winner.

If you want to win anything - a race, yourself, your life - you have to go a little berserk.

To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain - not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.

Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon.

To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.

For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear leaves and listen to rain and look to the day when it all is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.

We who run...are different from those who merely study us. We are out there experiencing what they are trying to put into words.

Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.

Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.

If marathoners finish they win.

There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.

People begin running for any number of motives, but we stick to it for one basic reason-to find out who we really are.

Because until we write it down, we don't know what is actually at the root of our lives.

Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.

Sport is an essential element of education.

Play is where life lives