Best Jesse Owens Quotes
Jesse Owens Quotes About 1936 Olympics, Motivational, Life, Keep Going on, Self Discipline & Last Words! An American track and field athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It has been 25 years since he set the world record in the long jump. He was born in Oakville, Alabama, on September 12, 1913. His family relied on him to collect up to 100 pounds of cotton daily to put food on the table when he was just seven years old.
When Owens was nine years old, he and his family relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where the young “J.C.” found a world very apart from the plodding, Southern existence he’d known initially. Owens soon established himself as a nationally renowned sprinter at East Technical High School, establishing records in the 100 and 200-yard races and the long jump. After graduating from high school, Owens attended Ohio State University, where he continued to excel as an athlete.
Hitler criticised the United States for allowing Black athletes to compete in the Olympic Games. However, the African-American athletes were instrumental in solidifying American dominance in the Olympic Games. For the next 25 years, Owens held the world record for the broad jump till Olympian Irvin Roberson broke it in 1960. After helping the United States win gold in the Olympic Games, Owens returned home to a disappointing reception.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not recognise Owens, as was customary for champions. It wasn’t until 1976 that President Gerald Ford bestowed upon the athlete the Presidential Medal of Freedom. After the 1936 Olympic Games, Owens quit amateur sports and began earning money from his physical abilities. Lung cancer took Owens’ life on March 31 of that year in Tucson, Ariz.
Best Jesse Owens Quotes
1. “The thrill of competing carries with it the thrill of a gold medal. One wants to win to prove himself the best.” -Jesse Owens
2. “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.”-Jesse Owens
3. “Find the good. It’s all around you. Find it, showcase it, and you’ll start believing in it.”-Jesse Owens
4. “A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.”-Jesse Owens
5. “Life doesn’t give you all the practice races you need.”-Jesse Owens
6. “Championships are mythical. The real champions are those who live through what they are taught in their homes and churches.”-Jesse Owens
7. “To a sprinter, the hundred-yard dash is over in three seconds, not nine or ten.”-Jesse Owens
8. “Running is real. It’s all joy and woe, hard as diamond. It makes you weary beyond comprehension, but it also makes you free.”-Jesse Owens
9. “People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do?”-Jesse Owens
10. “The only bond worth anything between human beings is their humanness.”-Jesse Owens
11. “If you don’t try to win you might as well hold the Olympics in somebody’s back yard.”-Jesse Owens
12. “I fought, I fought harder… but one cell at a time, panic crept into my body, taking me over.”-Jesse Owens
13. “People come out to see you perform and you’ve got to give them the best you have within you.”-Jesse Owens
14. “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.”-Jesse Owens
15. “Joe, Louis and I were the first modern national sports figures who were black.”-Jesse Owens
16. “Only by God’s grace have I made it to see today and only by God’s grace will I ever see tomorrow.”-Jesse Owens
17. “If it’s clay, it pretty much means it was here before 10,000 B.C. Most archaeologists don’t believe humans were in North America that early.”-Jesse Owens
18. “One chance is all you need.”-Jesse Owens
19. “Friendships born on the field of athletic strife are the real gold of competition. “-Jesse Owens
20. “Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.”-Jesse Owens
21. “As I’d learned long ago from Charles Riley, the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.”-Jesse Owens
22. “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?”-Jesse Owens
22. “It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals.”-Jesse Owens
23. “Every morning, just like in Alabama, I got up with the sun, ate my breakfast even before my mother and sisters and brothers, and went to school, winter, spring, and fall alike to run and jump and bend my body this way and that for Mr. Charles Riley.”-Jesse Owens
24. “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.”-Jesse Owens
25. “It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it’s close.”-Jesse Owens
26. “We’d get into these little towns and tell ’em to get out the fastest guy in town, and Jesse Owens would spot him ten yards and beat him.”-Jesse Owens
27. “It’s like having a pet dog for a long time. You get attached to it, and when it dies, you miss it.”-Jesse Owens
28. “I let my feet spend as little time on the ground as possible. From the air, fast down, and from the ground, fast up.”-Jesse Owens
29. “I’m old now. It’s all right.”-Jesse Owens
30. “There is something that can happen to every athlete and every human being; the instinct to slack off, to give in to the pain, to give less than your best.”-Jesse Owens
