Lance Armstrong Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

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.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
I don't have anything against organized religion per se. We all need something in our lives. I personally just have not accepted that belief. But I'm one of the few.

Lance Armstrong
I want to finish by saying that I intend to be an avid spokesperson for testicular cancer once I have beaten the disease... I want this to be a positive experience and I want to take this opportunity to help others who might someday suffer from the same circumstance I face today.

Lance Armstrong
I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise.

Lance Armstrong
A life spent defensively, worried, is a life wasted.
You know when I need to die? When I'm done living. When I can't walk, can't eat, can't see, when I'm a crotchety old bastard, mad at the world. Then I can die.

Lance Armstrong
I'm a flawed character... I viewed this situation as one big lie that I repeated a lot of times.

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

Lance Armstrong
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.

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

Lance Armstrong
We each cope differently with the specter of our deaths. Some people deny it. Some pray. Some numb themselves with tequila. I was tempted to do a little of each of those things. But I think we are supposed to try to face it straightforwardly, armed with nothing but courage.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
What makes a great endurance athlete is the ability to absorb potential embarrassment, and to suffer without complaint. I was discovering that if it was a matter of gritting my teeth, not caring how it looked, and outlasting everybody else, I won. It didn't seem to matter what sport it was-in a straight-ahead, long-distant race, I could beat anybody. If it was a suffer-fest, I was good at it.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
When you win, you don't examine it very much, except to congratulate yourself. You easily, and wrongly, assume it has something to do with your rare qualities as a person. But winning only measures how hard you've worked and how physically talented you are; it doesn't particularly define you beyond those characteristics.

Lance Armstrong
Athletes don't have much use for poking around in their childhoods, because, introspection doesn't get you anywhere in a race.

Lance Armstrong
We have unrealized capacities that sometimes only emerge in crisis.

Lance Armstrong
I've read that I flew up the hills and mountains of France. But you don't fly up a hill. You struggle slowly and painfully up a hill, and maybe, if you work very hard, you get to the top ahead of everybody else.

Lance Armstrong
If there is a defining characteristic of a man as opposed to a boy, maybe it's patience.

Lance Armstrong
It's a fact that children with cancer have higher cure rates than adults with cancer, and I wonder if the reason is their natural, unthinking bravery... Adults know too much about failure; they're more cynical and resigned and fearful.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
You can teach someone how to control their strength, but you can't teach them to be strong.

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

Lance Armstrong
The truth is, if you asked me to choose between winning the Tour de France and cancer, I would choose cancer. Odd as it sounds, I would rather have the title of cancer survivor than winner of the Tour, because of what it has done for me as a human being, a man, a husband, a son, and a father.

Lance Armstrong
Nothing goes to waste, you put it all to use, the old wounds and long-ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
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.

Lance Armstrong
We have two options, medically and emotionally: give up or fight like hell.

Lance Armstrong
A boo is a lot louder than a cheer, if you have 10 people cheering and one person booing all you hear is the booing.

Lance Armstrong