I don't think academic writing ever was wonderful. However, science used to be much less specialized.

Make haste slowly.

Proverb

Imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

John Green

The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.

Maimonides

Great athletes train their minds as well as their bodies. There are various mental conditioning techniques many use when preparing for an event. Perhaps the best known technique is visualization, creating a mental image not only of the desired result (the gold medal, a new world record, a hole-in-one), but also of every move that will be taken en route to the ultimate goal.

Source Unknown

Sport is an international phenomenon, like science or music.

Avery Brundage

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

Reginald B. Mansell

There may indeed be those who would prefer to deny the existence of a God so powerful, rather than believe that all other things are uncertain. But let us not oppose them for the present, and grant that all that is here said of a God is a fable; nevertheless in whatever way they suppose that I have arrived at the state of being that I have reached -- whether they attribute it to fate or to accident, or make out that it is by a continual succession of antecedents, or by some other method -- since to err and deceive oneself is a defect, it is clear that the greater will be the probability of my being so imperfect as to deceive myself ever, as is the Author to whom they assign my origin the less powerful. To these reasons I have certainly nothing to reply, but at the end I feel constrained to confess that there is nothing in all that I formerly believed to be true, of which I cannot in some measure doubt, and that not merely through want of thought or through levity, but for reasons which are very powerful and maturely considered; so that henceforth I ought not the less carefully to refrain from giving credence to these opinions than to that which is manifestly false, if I desire to arrive at any certainty in the sciences.http://www.xs4all.nl/~maartens/philosophy/descartes/meditations/med1.html

Rene Descartes, Meditations On F

Perhaps I'd like to design cars, but I don't think I'd be much good at it.

Jonathan Ive

I don't actually own a car.

Chris Martin

I liked the energy of cooking, the action, the camaraderie. I often compare the kitchen to sports and compare the chef to a coach. There are a lot of similarities to it.

Todd English

Antiquities are history defaced, or some remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.

Francis Bacon

Deeds need time, even after they are done, in order to be seen or heard.

Friedrich Nietzsche