" I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it."

Alice Walker
The Color Purple, 1982

“Commitment to Excellence”

“And it’s a grace, I think, a great deal like life in that it demands that a man’s personal commitment be toward excellence and be toward victory, even though you know that ultimate victory can never be completely won. Yet it must be pursued with all of one’s might. And each week there’s a new encounter, each year a new challenge. The spirit, the will to win and the will to excel, these are the things that endure and these are the qualities that are so much more important than any of the events that occasion them.  And I’d like to say that the quality of any man’s life has got to be a full measure of that man’s personal commitment to excellence and to victory, regardless of what field he may be in.” 

Vince Lombardi

Excerpts form his “Commitment to Excellence” speech

Abigail Adams in a letter to John Quincy Adams, May 8, 1780

To focus your energies on Answers - Not excuses!

--Calvin Coolidge            

"Truth exists,
only falsehood has to be invented."
Georges Braque

“There are human elements in all these things. I would never, ever blame a loss on one play, or an official, or a player. If you want to blame anybody, blame me. The game is too great to reduce it to excuses or making bogus statements like: 'If this would have happened or that would have happened. Well, it didn't happen! 
Be a man and congratulate the winner and go on." 
Mike Krzyzewski's 
post game comments after his loss to Indiana in the 2002 NCAA Playoffs

---Confucius

Success doesn't mean the absence of failures; 
It means the attainment of ultimate objectives. 
It means winning the war, not every battle.
-- Edwin C. Bliss

What lies behind us and 
what lies before us 
are tiny matters compared to 
what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson- 
This quote was sent to me by one of our former greats!

When one door closes, another door opens. But we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which opened for us.
---Alexander Graham Bell

I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
-Thomas Jefferson

"Work as if you were to live a hundred years,
 Pray as if you were to die tomorrow."  
Benjamin Franklin

There is more to life than increasing its speed.
                                                                                               Mahatma Gandhi
Enjoy the Holidays!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Life is not a spectator Sport... 

If you're going to spend your whole life in the grandstand just watching what goes on, 
in my opinion you're wasting your life.
---Jackie Robinson

Problem is, we just don't recognize the most significant events of our lives while they are happening.

Doc Moonlight Graham

"The Man in the Arena"
 "It is not the critic who counts,
not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles,
or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. 
The credit belongs to the man in the arena,
whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,
who strives valiantly...
who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions,
who spends himself in a worthy cause,
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and  
who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly,
so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls
 who have never known neither victory nor defeat."

 THEODORE ROOSEVELT
(Paris Sorbonne,1910)

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. 
Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death.  
So.... it doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.... 

When the sun comes up, you'd better be running!"

"The Greatest Discovery of Any Generation is that A Human Being 
Can Alter His Life By Altering His Attitude."            
                                                                                William James