He did not know how long it took, but later he looked back on this time of crying in the corner of the dark cave and thought of it as when he learned the most important rule of survival, which was that feeling sorry for yourself didn't work. It wasn't just that it was wrong to do, or that it was considered incorrect. It was more than that--it didn't work.
Techniques employ four qualities that reflect the nature of our world. Depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space.
The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.
I don't know why, but I respond well to tortured characters.
Running from your fear can be more painful than facing it, for better or worse.
Discipline makes hard men. Every hard man is capable of being a killer. But every killer is not capable of being a hard man. They can't endure that much. It's all about the endurance. That's why they become killers. Because they can't endure the pain. They need to kill the pain to stop it.
I believe that having something to hope for - even if it's just a better tomorrow- is the most powerful drug on this planet.
The biggest challenge is learning how to psych yourself up into believing in yourself as you walk into the Octagon.
The possibility of physical and mental collapse is very real now... but collapse is out of the question; as a solution or even a cheap alternative, it is unacceptable. No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind.
Under pressure, you can win with your mind.
Ninety percent of my game is mental. It's my concentration that has gotten me this far. I won't even call a friend on the day of a match. I'm scared of disrupting my concentration. I don't allow any competition with tennis.
I think I'm blessed with a pretty tough psyche.
Mental toughness must be developed before you start fighting because you don't want to be that guy who quits in the ring.
I don't think anyone can walk through the world in a state of vulnerability all the time, can they?
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
The mind is the most important thing of the big picture and no one has a stronger mindset than amateur wrestlers.
Intensity makes you stronger. Emotionalism makes you weaker.
The most important attribute a player must have is mental toughness.
I know you're supposed to be thick-skinned in this business, but I'm not. I kind of like to hang on to being vulnerable.
The Special Ops community has always been about mental toughness.
I come from a mother who can cry at a G.E. commercial.
A fight is 10% physical and 90% mental.
I'm astonished how little fright I have of my own imagination. It really does baffle me that I don't get more scared because I'm capable of thinking up things that are so awful. On any given day I can imagine the worst.
Confidence? Are you kidding me? I mean, please. Look, some players grow up and play like that. I remember losing junior matches. Just being down 5-2 in the third, and they all just start slapping shots.
