Lance Armstrong Quotes

The way you live your life, the perspective you select, is a choice you make every single day when you wake up. It's yours to decide.

What athletes do may not be that healthy, the way we push our bodies completely over the edge to the degrees that are not human. I've said all along that I will not live as long as the average person.

Chasing records doesn't keep me on my bike. Happiness does.

I look forward to a time when lawyers aren't in the top three calls every day, and all you care about is how your kids are doing in school or what the weather's like and the great day you had with your family.

I didn't just jump back on the bike and win. There were a lot of ups and downs, good results and bad results, but this time I didn't let the lows get to me.

Motivation can't take you very far if you don't have the legs.

Cycling is a sport of the open road and spectators are lining that road.

The team wasn't just riders. It was the mechanics, masseurs, chefs, soigneurs, and doctors. But the most important man on the team may have been the chiropractor.

Your past forms you, whether you like it or not. Each encounter and experience has its own effect, and you're shaped the way the wind shapes a mesquite tree on a plain.

No one automatically gives you respect just because you show up. You have to earn it

I know what happened to my foundation, from raising no money to raising $500m, serving three million people. Do we want to take that away? I don't think anybody says yes.

There were no shortcuts, I realized. It took years of racing to build up the mind and body and character until a rider had logged hundreds of races and thousands of miles of road. I wouldn't be able to win a Tour de France until I had enough iron in my legs, and lungs, and brain and Heart.

So if there is a purpose to the suffering that is cancer, I think it must be this: it's meant to improve us.

I figure the faster I pedal, the faster I can retire.

My mother told me...if you're going to get anywhere, you're going to have to do it yourself, because no one is going to do it for you.

Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.

If you ever get a second chance in life for something, you've got to go all the way.

I wanted to live, but whether I would or not was mystery, and in the midst of confronting that fact, even at that moment, I was beginning to sense that to stare into the heart of such a fearful mystery wasn't a bad thing. To be afraid is a priceless education. P 99

It's tougher for me. But I don't think that's imperative to me starting a new movement, or revive an old movement, to help people.

At the end of the day, if there was indeed some Body or presence standing there to judge me, I hoped I would be judged on whether I had lived a true life, not on whether I believed in a certain book, or whether I'd been baptized. If there was indeed a God at the end of my days, I hoped he didn't say, But you were never a Christian, so you're going the other way from heaven. If so, I was going to reply, You know what? You're right. Fine.

Anything is possible, but you have to believe and you have to fight.

Obviously, I come from one background, and the people that design fitness equipment have been doing it for years and years, and they know what works and doesn't work.

In my most painful moments on the bike, I am at my most curious and I wonder each and every time how I will respond.

There was more happiness in the process, in the build, in the preparation. The winning was almost phoned in.

Fear is priceless education.

We sped on, across the plains, toward Metz. I hung back, saving myself. It is called the Race of Truth. The early stages separate the strong riders from the weak. Now the weak would be eliminated altogether.

Nineteen hundred meters up there is completely different from1,900 any place else. There's no air, there's no oxygen. There's no vegetation, there's no life. There's no life. Rocks. Any other climb there's vegetation, grass and trees. Not there on the Ventoux. It's more like the moon than a mountain.

There were something like 50 good, arduous climbs around Nice, solid inclines of ten miles or more. The trick was not to climb every once in awhile, but to climb repeatedly. I would do three different climbs in one day, over the course of a six- or seven-hour ride. A 12 mile climb took about an hour, so that tells you what my days were like.

At least I didn't invent a dead girlfriend

For whatever reason, maybe it's because of my story, but people associate Livestrong with exercise and physical fitness, health and lifestyle choices like that.

The last thing I'll say for the people that don't believe in cycling, the cynics and the sceptics, I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry you can't dream big and I'm sorry you don't believe in miracles.

I realize that there are many variables outside my control in my quest, but focusing on the big goal down the road really motivates me. To help me stay focused, I set micro-goals such as races or training achievements that bring me one step closer to being at my best for major goals

I joined the swim team when I was 12, and I was the worst kid in the pool - I was put with a group of 7-year-olds.

I didn't invent the culture, but I didn't try to stop the culture.

Marathons are hard because of the physical pain, the pounding on the muscles, joints, tendons.

I don't think anybody else from my generation had federal agents standing at their door with a badge and a gun, saying: 'You are going to answer my questions'.

Nobody needs to cry for me. I'm going to be great.

Truth is, a triathlete won the Tour de France seven times.

My career is going to be played out year by year. Will I be here in 2004? I don't know. The record won't keep me here. Happiness will.

Through my illness I learned rejection. I was written off. That was the moment I thought, Okay, game on. No prisoners. Everybody's going down.

Everybody wants to know what I'm on. What am I on? I'm on my bike busting my ass six hours a day. What are you on?

If you worried about falling off the bike, you'd never get on.

When I made the decision - when my team-mates made that decision, when the whole peloton made that decision - it was a bad decision and an imperfect time. But it happened.

Losing and dying: it's the same thing.

I raced because I was paid to do a job and I felt like I had to do the job. Number two: I raced because I loved the process, I loved training, getting ready for the race, I loved all of that. And number three I raced for my memories. Regardless of what somebody wants to give or take away, you can't take my memories.

I guess if I looked at it from an athletic standpoint, I don't really need to win another Tour. Seven Tours for me was a dream, six broke the record, so that eight doesn't really mean much.

We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis.

I thought I knew what fear was, until I heard the words 'You have cancer'.