Top 50 George A. Sheehan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Success means having the courage, the determination, and the will to become the person you believe you were meant to be.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Determination Quotes

2. “It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Keep Going Quotes, Workout Quotes, Don't Give Up Quotes, Quitting Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

3. “Sport is an essential element of education.”

— George A. Sheehan

4. “Everyone is an athlete. The only difference is that some of us are in training, and some are not.”

— George A. Sheehan

5. “I have met my hero, and he is me.”

— George A. Sheehan

6. “The real competition is against the little voice inside you that wants to quit.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Real Quotes

7. “Happiness is different from pleasure. Happiness has something to do with struggling and enduring and accomplishing.”

— George A. Sheehan

8. “The mind’s first step to self-awareness must be through the body.”

— George A. Sheehan

9. “Out on the roads there is fitness and self-discovery and the persons we were destined to be.”

— George A. Sheehan

10. “Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.”

— George A. Sheehan

11. “Anything that changes your values changes your behaviour.”

— George A. Sheehan

12. “The answer to the big questions in running is the same as the answer to the big questions in life: Do the best with what you’ve got.”

— George A. Sheehan

13. “Sweat cleanses from the inside. It comes from places a shower will never reach.”

— George A. Sheehan

14. “There are as many reasons for running as there are days in the year, years in my life. But mostly I run because I am an animal and a child, an artist and a saint. So, too, are you. Find your own play, your own self-renewing compulsion, and you will become the person you are meant to be.”

— George A. Sheehan

15. “The obsession with running is really an obsession with the potential for more and more life.”

— George A. Sheehan

16. “If you want to win anything – a race, yourself, your life – you have to go a little berserk.”

— George A. Sheehan

17. “Every runner is an experiment of one.”

— George A. Sheehan

18. “Play is where life lives.”

— George A. Sheehan

19. “Nothing is more certain than the defeat of a man who gives up.”

— George A. Sheehan

20. “Fitness has to be fun. If it is not play there will be no fitness. Play, you see, is where the process. Fitness is merely the product.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Fun Quotes

21. “The more I run, the more I want to run, and the more I live a life conditioned and influenced and fashioned by my running. And the more I run, the more certain I am that I am heading for my real goal: to become the person I am.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Real Quotes

22. “Listen to your body. Do not be a blind and deaf tenant.”

— George A. Sheehan

23. “If marathoners finish they win.”

— George A. Sheehan

24. “Of all the races, there is no better stage for heroism than a marathon.”

— George A. Sheehan

Featured in: Running Quotes

25. “Success rests with having the courage and endurance and, above all, the will to become the person you are, however peculiar that may be. Then you will be able to say, I found my hero and he is me.”

— George A. Sheehan

26. “Life is a positive-sum game. Everyone from the gold medallist to the last finisher can rejoice in a personal victory.”

— George A. Sheehan

27. “Have you ever felt worse after a run?”

— George A. Sheehan

28. “Exercise: you don’t have time not to.”

— George A. Sheehan

29. “I will not last forever. But I am damn well going to know I have been here.”

— George A. Sheehan

30. “On the roads, I can see truth revealed whole without thought or reason. There I experience the sudden understanding that comes unasked, unbidden. I simply rest, rest within myself, rest within the pure rhythm of my running. And I wait.”

— George A. Sheehan

31. “Fitness is just a stage you pass through on the way to becoming a racer.”

— George A. Sheehan

32. “To know you are one with what you are doing, to know that you are a complete athlete, begins with believing you are a runner.”

— George A. Sheehan

33. “Life is the greatest experiment. Each of us is an experiment of one-observer and subject-making choices, living with them, recording the effects.”

— George A. Sheehan

34. “Exercise is done against one’s wishes and maintained only because the alternative is worse.”

— George A. Sheehan

35. “The music of a marathon is a powerful strain, one of those tunes of glory. It asks us to forsake pleasures, to discipline the body, to find courage, to renew faith and to become one’s own person, utterly and completely.”

— George A. Sheehan

36. “If you want to find the answers to the Big Questions about your soul, you’d best begin with the Little Answers about your body.”

— George A. Sheehan

37. “Once you have decided that winning isn’t everything, you become a winner.”

— George A. Sheehan

38. “To make your life a work of art, you must have the material to work with. The race, any race, is just such an experience.”

— George A. Sheehan

39. “Because until we write it down, we don’t know what is actually at the root of our lives.”

— George A. Sheehan

40. “The difference between a jogger and a runner is an entry blank.”

— George A. Sheehan

41. “I run each day to preserve the self I attained the day before and to secure the self yet to be.”

— George A. Sheehan

42. “Why race? The need to be tested, perhaps; the need to take risks; and the chance to be number one.”

— George A. Sheehan

43. “To keep from decaying, to be a winner, the athlete must accept pain – not only accept it, but look for it, live with it, learn not to fear it.”

— George A. Sheehan

44. “No matter how old I get, the race remains one of life’s most rewarding experiences.”

— George A. Sheehan

45. “For every runner who tours the world running marathons, there are thousands who run to hear the leaves and listen to the rain, and look to the day when it is suddenly as easy as a bird in flight.”

— George A. Sheehan

46. “The desire to run comes from deep within us – from the unconscious, the instinctive, the intuitive.”

— George A. Sheehan

47. “I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an ‘A’ in my book’. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.”

— George A. Sheehan

48. “The true runner is a very fortunate person. He has found something in him that is just perfect.”

— George A. Sheehan

49. “There is no substitute for learning to live in our bodies.”

— George A. Sheehan

50. “Sport is singularly able to give us peak experience where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.”

— George A. Sheehan