Superiority lies with he who is reared in the severest school.
-Thucydides
Nature can do what it wants with my body, but it cannot affect my soul.
-Unknown
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-Aldous Huxley
Take a 170lb guy, a 5’11″ 170lb guy, that’s RIPPED at 6% bodyfat. If you put clothes on him he just looks like a skinny guy who doesn’t train to me.
-Mark Rippetoe
Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general.
-Mark Rippetoe
The Germans have aptly called Sitzfleisch the ability to spend endless hours at a desk doing grueling work. Sitzfleisch is considered by mathematicians to be a better gauge of success than any of the attractive definitions of talent with which psychologists regale us from time to time.
-Gian-Carlo Rota
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
-Richard Dawkins
Excuses are the nails used to build a house of failure.
-Don Wilder and Bill Rechin
Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves.
-Edwin Way Teale
But it’s important to remember that mathematics is a symbolic language–a type of poetry that uses numbers and symbols instead of words to convey a sense of reality underlying our conventional experience.
-The Joy of Living pg. 73
We’re little different from the Spanish explorers who dedicated their lives to the quest for El Dorado, which was always just around the next bend in the river, yet never there at all.
http://www.salon.com/life/pinched/2009/12/06/living_in_a_van
By Ken Ilgunas
Determination can get you far in life, even if you suck.
-Me
You know those days where you can’t imagine things getting any worse? You aren’t imagining hard enough.
-Mike Rowe (of Dirty Jobs)
I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.
-Major Andrew Olmsted, KIA 080103
Somewhere a True Believer is training to kill you. He is training with minimal food or water, in austere conditions, training day and night. The only thing clean on him is his weapon and he made his web gear. He doesn’t worry about what workout to do – his ruck weighs what it weighs, his runs end when the enemy stops chasing him. This True Believer is not concerned about ‘how hard it is;’ he knows either he wins or dies. He doesn’t go home at 17:00, he is home.
He knows only The Cause.
Still want to quit?
-NousDefionsDoc of Professional Soldiers
As an archer aims an arrow, as a carpenter carves wood, the wise shape their lives.
-The Dhammapada
Become what you are.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
The mathematicians subject is the most curious of all – there is none in which truth plays such odd pranks.
-G.H. Hardy
Time served doesn’t guarantee good judgement. A resume doesn’t guarantee good character.
-Barak Obama
Marines I see as two breeds, Rottweilers or Dobermans, because Marines come in two varieties, big and mean, or skinny and mean. They’re aggressive on the attack and tenacious on the defense. They’ve got really short hair and always go for the throat.
-RAdm “Jay” R. Stark, USN, 10 Nov. 1995
The study of theology, as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authority; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion.
-Thomas Paine
It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
The most important ingredient in any expert system is knowledge.
-Bruce G. Buchanon, Randall Davis, & Edward A. Feigenbaum
An army can win while it still has legs under it; the real test comes when all strength is fled and the men must produce victory on will alone.
-Spartans
Training exercises in Roman legions were bloodless battles — so that their battles were bloody exercises. Equivalently, Train in bloodless battles to fight bloody exercises.
-Unknown
Today is the death of yesterday.
-Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse
Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
-Gen. James Mattis, USMC
Of all religions the Christian is without doubt the one which should inspire tolerance most, although up to now the Christians have been the most intolerant of all men.
-Voltaire
Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle.
-Abraham Lincoln
You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end – which you can never afford to lose – with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
-Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale
The trouble with cyclists is that their training establishment keeps reinforcing the silly bullshit that all recreational athletes want to believe: at some point, all serious athletes go outside their sport-specific work to improve, and recreational athletes just want to play their sport and wear the clothes.
-Mark Rippetoe
Never forget that you are an animal. Perhaps more evolved than some but an animal nonetheless.
-Me
Hey Adam — came to check out your blog again to see what you were writing about these days… I see you are doing some very intense workouts! It’s great you are keeping yourself in such good shape!
Hope all is well with you two; hopefully we get to see you sometime in the near future?
Take care – b