Spirit

You will not win every competition, whether against your past self or against present others. You will not always succeed. You will not always run the fastest, jump the highest, punch the hardest.

But you can scream the loudest. You can lose, honorably, for a million reasons. You can only lose dishonorably for one: you did not try with every ounce of you.

Let them point to my failures, and my head will stay high. Let my works crumble, and I will build new ones. Let them point to a broken man at the end of his days, with nothing – and I will still breathe until my last noble breath. But let them never say, “there goes a man who gave up before the very last.”

You can break everything but my spirit, and it will not matter. Spirit is the seed; all else is merely fruit.