There can be no difference anywhere that does not make a difference somewhere.
I think I'm going to my grave without swimming from Cuba to Florida.
I want to see all the countries in the world and learn all the languages. I want to have thousands of friends and I want all my friends to be different. I want to play six instruments. I want to be the best in the world at two things. I want to be a great athlete and I want to be a great surgeon. I need to practice very hard every day. I need to sleep as little as possible. I need to read at least one major book every week. And I need to remember that my seventy years are going to go by too quickly.
Just getting in the pool for seven straight hours is unbearable to me. . . . It's grueling. There's nothing physically pleasurable about it. If you're doing a hard workout, you're throwing up in the gutter. At night you cling to your pillow and just hope that your body revives before you have to go back and do it again.
From age eleven to age sixteen I lived a spartan life without the usual adolescent uncertainty. I wanted to be the best swimmer in the world, and there was nothing else.
If you can just immerse yourself in your life, it doesn't matter what you do everyday. Just do it intensely. Be in it, so that when you go to sleep you're exhausted every night and you say, 'Whoa, I just couldn't have done any more with that day. '
Swimming is probably the ultimate of burnout sports.
I do not like the word tolerance, but could not think of a better one. Tolerance implies a gratuitous assumption of the inferiority of other faiths to one
Creativity is our birthright. It is an integral part of being human, as basic as walking, talking and thinking.
Yoga is nothing if it is not perfect harmonyof the body, senses, mind and intellect, reason, consciousness and self. When all these are integrated that is true yoga.
If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as a string of unrelated events, then the question doesn't come up.