My greatest point is my persistence. I never give up in a match. However down I am I fight until the last ball. My list of matches shows that I have turned a great many so-called irretrievable defeats into victories.

The boy who is going to make a great man must not make up his mind merely to overcome a thousand obstacles but to win in spite of a thousand repulses and defeats.

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

Jews survived all the defeats expulsions persecutions and pogroms the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people even the Holocaust itself because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

To try to fashion something from suffering to relish our triumphs and to endure defeats without resentment: all that is compatible with the faith of a heretic.

There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.

What differentiates us from animals is the fact that we can listen to other people's dreams fears joys sorrows desires and defeats - and they in turn can listen to ours.

There's a victory and defeat the first and best of victories the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another but of himself.

Art is only a means to life to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way something which is overlooked not only by the public but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.