Jesse Owens Quotes

We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams come into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.

Find the good. It's all around you. Find it, showcase it and you'll start believing in it.

The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself - the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us - that's where it's at.

Although I wasn't invited to shake hands with Hitler, I wasn't invited to the White House to shake hands with the President either.

The only victory that counts is the one over yourself.

Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

One chance is all you need.

A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.

Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.

Hitler didn't snub me - it was our president who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram.

Only by God?s grace have I made it to see today and only by God?s grace will I ever see tomorrow.

If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard.

I always loved running.... It was something you could do by yourself and under your own power.

The lives of most men are patchwork quilts. Or at best one matching outfit with a closet and laundry bag full of incongruous accumulations. A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.

When I passed the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me, and I waved back at him. I think the writers showed bad taste in criticizing the man of the hour in Germany.

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn't a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.

I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.

People come out to see you perform and you've got to give them the best you have within you.

If you don't try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody's back yard. The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close

I fought, I fought harder . . . but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.

I decided I wasn't going to come down. I was going to fly. I was going to stay up in the air forever.

It dawned on me with blinding brightness. I realized: I had jumped into another rare kind of stratosphere - one that only a handful of people in every generation are lucky enough to know.

He was constantly on me about the job that I was to do and the responsibility that I had upon the campus. And how I must be able to carry myself because people were looking.

For a time, at least, I was the most famous person in the entire world.

I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals.

It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards.

We used to have a lot of fun. We never had any problems. We always ate. The fact that we didn't have steak? Who had steak?

Life doesn't give you all the practice races you need.

I'd noticed him watching me for a year or so, especially when we'd play games where there was running or jumping.

It's like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies you miss it.

To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.

It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.