Pressure Quotes

It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.'

The pressure of 'what are you going to do?' makes everyone feel like they haven't done anything yet.

You never know what's going on in somebody's mind. There's a lot of pressure on someone growing up. You have to watch it.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.

My life is nothing but pressure. All pressure. This pressure is like a heaviness. It's always on top of me, this heaviness. It's always there since I'm a kid. Other people wake up in the morning, 'A new day! Ah, up and at 'em!' I wake up, the heaviness is waiting for me nice. Sometimes I even talk to it. I say [adopts cheerful voice] 'Hi, heaviness!' and the heaviness looks back at me, [in an ominous growl] 'Today you're gonna get it good. You'll be drinking early today.'

Remember, George, this is no time to go wobbly.

One: demonstrations always crash. And two: the probability of them crashing goes up exponentially with the number of people watching.

What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it's because that's what's inside.

Nothing is so great an adversary to those who make it their business to please as expectation.

I don't feel any pressure from fans. But I'm always in some kind of state of emotional turmoil. I would not describe myself as happy-go-lucky. That's not to say that I'm not happy.

When you are nominated for the best player in Europe, the Ballon d'Or, playing in the Champions League, there is so much pressure. You don't know what will happen. This pressure is inside you - you always have it.

It's a heavy duty to try to do everything and please everybody. My job was to go out there and play the game of basketball as best I can and provide entertainment for everyone who wanted to watch basketball. Obviously, people may not agree with that; again, I can't live with what everyone's impression of what I should or what I shouldn't do.

Everyone in boxing probably makes out well except for the fighter. He's the only one that's on Skid Row most of the time; he's the only one that everybody just leaves when he loses his mind. He sometimes goes insane, he sometimes goes on the bottle, because it's an intensive pressure sport that allows people to just lose it.

Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.

Under pressure, the mouth speaks when the brain is disengaged, and, sometimes unwittingly, the gearshift is in reverse when it should be in neutral.

I mean we [The Beatles] had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell .

You never really know yourself until you see yourself under pressure.

I have forgiven myself; I'll make a change. Once that forgiveness has taken place you can console yourself with the knowledge that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure. Less pressure is crystal, less than that is coal, less than that is fossilized leaves or plain dirt. Pressure can change you into something quite precious, quite wonderful, quote beautiful and extremely hard.

Only the unprepared are overcome by pressure

Wherever you may seek solitude, men will ferret you out and compel you to belong to their desperate company of oddfellows.

My golf is so delicate, so tenuously wired together with silent inward prayers, exhortations and unstable visualizations, that the sheer pressure of an additional pair of eyes crumbles the whole rickety structure into rubble.

Sometimes when I'm under pressure, if I think somebody is expecting stuff from me, I'll do better than if I was just left on my own. I can sit down - I'm a skilled writer, I've been doing it all my life - and I can get down to it.

There's a lot of pressure putting an album out all over the world and hoping people everywhere like it.

You're an idiot. You've screwed up every play we ever ran. You're too stupid to even remember the plays. We ought to get rid of you.

Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today's competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents' faces. As an adult, he'll carry around a little wallet card that says "7x9=63," because it will remind him of mother.

If I thought of the number of people who were watching me as I got ready to shoot, I?d miss it.

You cannot defect form an insight. You cannot unsee what you have seen.

I would tell players to relax and never think about what's at stake. Just think about the basketball game. If you start to think about who is going to win the championship, you've lost your focus.

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years, then they expect you to pick a career.

If I had stood at the free-throw line and thought about 10 million people watching me on the other side of the camera lens, I couldn't have made anything. So I mentally tried to put myself in a familiar place. I thought about all those times I shot free throws in practice and went through the same motion, the same technique that I had used thousands of times. You forget about the outcome. You know you are doing the right things. So you relax and perform.

It's easy to forget who you are.

There is such a thing as the pressure of darkness.

Sometimes when you are the closest to your breakthrough the pressure is the greatest. You have come too far to give up now!

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

To be under pressure is inescapable. Pressure takes place through all the world; war, siege, the worries of state. We all know men who grumble under these pressures and complain. They are cowards. They lack splendour. But there is another sort of man who is under the same pressure but does not complain, for it is the friction which polishes him. It is the pressure which refines and makes him noble

In truth I never really liked any of the heavy drugs, because normally my energy is up when I'm performing, and that's about it. Cocaine is nothing new. It's the pressure, I think. People use it to relieve that, and for me it is about getting numb and forgetting. I have a reverse metabolic reaction to the stuff.

I think a lot of parents live their lives through the kids. Because they didn't make it [achieve something], they want their kids to make it. It puts a lot of undue pressure on the kids.

Some days I totally appreciate everything that's happening to me, and some days I feel everyone's waiting for me to mess up.

There are so many people pulling at me at one time - some want the business, some want my love, some just want my support, just to be there or to acknowledge them the same way I used to. To be able to figure that out is an ongoing process, because there's always another show, another album, another moment that I don't want to miss. But I'm pacing myself. I hope the powers that be keep me on a straight course.

I couldn't imagine, and I don't say this with any pride, but I really couldn't imagine writing without a desperate deadline.

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-- And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over-- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?

I'm a freakin' artist, man, not a (expletive) race horse.

I knew at a young age, whether I was playing baseball or hockey or lacrosse, that my teammates were counting on me, whether it be to strike the last batter out in a baseball game or score a big goal in a hockey game.

No matter who you are, we're creatures of habit. The better your habits are, the better they will be in pressure situations.

I don't feel pressure, because I do what I want to do. I don't feel pressure at all. I've never done any movies because I thought this was what somebody wanted me to do. I'm a bit more, for lack of a better word, selfish than that. But like I say in the movie, you do what you have to do so that you can do what you want to do.

Many people try to avoid pressure, yet the absence of any tension or pressure usually creates a sense of boredom and the lackluster experience of life that so many people complain about.

From the moment I started writing raps, I was always aware of the pressure. I always wanted to live up to how huge Snoop got, how huge Dre got, how huge Pac got. I was always aware.

I don't care who you are, you're going to choke in certain matches. You get to a point where your legs don't move and you can't take a deep breath. You start to hit the ball about a yard wide, instead of inches.

Eight days ago, we were the toast of the town. Eight days later we're Thanksgiving turkeys.

At Real, psychological pressure on the players is much more serious than at United. This is good. At many clubs, you don't know the consequence of playing badly.

After I won the Pulitzer, there was this sense of, 'OK, that's enough for you. Now go away.' What I wanted was to keep writing, keep working. But no one would produce anything of mine they didn't think would be as big as ''night, Mother.'

Look at guys like Larry Bird and George Brett and John McEnroe; that's what they did in their careers. They all wanted to be the guy under the microscope late in the game or late in the match. So you just take on that know-how that that's part of your responsibility, and you learn that's what makes it exciting. That's what makes it fun!

You'll have to learn that public life takes a lot of sweat; but it doesn't need to worry you. You won't always be right, but you mustn't suffer from being wrong. That's what kills people like us.

What is the definition of guts? Grace under pressure.

Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity.

The press is ferocious. It forgives nothing, it only hunts for mistakes . . . In my position anyone sane would have left a long time ago.

If you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out. Nothing can come out of you that is not in you. If when you are pressured, anger comes out, it is not the fault of the person who pressured.

One day the absurdity of the almost universal human belief in the slavery of other animals will be palpable. We shall then have discovered our souls and become worthier of sharing this planet with them.

I'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams.

There are certain shades of limelight that can wreck a girl's complexion.