champions know there are no shortcuts to the top. They climb the mountain one step at a time. they have no use for helicopters!

I've always tried to do my best on the ball field. I can't do any more than that. I always try to give one hundred percent; and if my team loses, I come back and give one hundred percent the next day.

Push yourself again and again. Don't give an inch until the final buzzer sounds.

I want you to start a crusade in you life -- to dare to be your best.

Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well. The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.

The essence of our effort to see that every child has a chance must be to assure each an equal opportunity, not to become equal, but to become different- to realize whatever unique potential of body, mind and spirit he or she possesses.

If one has not given everything, one has given nothing.

People travel in the way of least resistance, by choosing one's environment, one will travel in a particular way.

What we hope ever to do with ease, we must learn first to do with diligence.

When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or in the life of another.

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

It is not the truth that a man possesses, or believes that he possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man. For it is not by the possession, but the search after truth that he enlarges his power, wherein alone consists his ever-increasing perfection.

Welcome the task that makes you go beyond yourself.

It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.

Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.

I want to be remembered as the guy who gave his all whenever he was on the field.

If someone had told me I would be pope one day, I would have studied harder.

Life does not require us to make good; it asks only that we give our best at each level of experience.

Nothing can come of nothing.

Swing hard, in case they throw the ball where you're swinging.

Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

The only method by which people can be supported is out of the effort of those who are earning their own way. We must not create a deterrent to hard work.

If your efforts are sometimes greeted with indifference, don't lose heart. The sun puts on a wonderful show at daybreak, yet most of the people in the audience go on sleeping.

If at first you don't succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.

It's the last inch that counts.

I don't believe people die from hard work. They die from stress and worry and fear -- the negative emotions. Those are the killers, not hard work. The fact is, in our society today, most people don't understand what hard work is all about.