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May 31

I see the athletes of the future taking the oath before the Games, each upon the flag of their own country … solemnly affirming that they have always been loyal and honorable in sport, and will approach the Olympic contests in a spirit of loyalty and honor.

The Games were established for the glorification of the individual champion, whose exploits are needed to maintain general eagerness and ambition.

The coming generation will see exceptional thinkers who are also athletes.

Physical exercise … can help to forge character, strengthen a community, and even, in democratic times, to provide a link between different social classes.

O Sport, you are Justice! The perfect equity for which men strive in vain in their social institutions is your constant companion.

To sustain and guide you, nourish a triple will: the will to physical joy, the will to unremitting altruism and the will to understand things wholly.

In this modern world, so full of powerful possibilities, and yet threatened by so many risks of degeneration, Olympism may be a school of moral nobility and purity … The future depends on you.

Regarding the Olympic Games … The idea of their revival was not a passing fancy: it was the logical culmination of a great movement.

First of all, there was the universal good humor of the athletes ...

I approach this new work in the sports spirit that together we have cultivated, that is to say with the same joy of effort …

We are not encroaching upon society's privileges; we are not a technical police council. We are simply the trustees of the Olympic ideal.

Sometimes the most physically gifted athletes are eliminated by those … who used greater energy and force of will to achieve their victories.

The principle of the Games has now been accepted by all nations.

The Hellenic ideal is the most sensible and the most profound of all the ideas that men have striven to put into practice.

Sport tends toward excess: more speed, greater height, more strength… always more. That is its drawback, but also its nobility—and its poetry.

… radiant with sunlight, exalted by music, framed in the architecture of porticoes … the glittering dream of ancient Olympism … dominated ancient society for many centuries.

Every four years the restored Olympic Games must provide a happy and fraternal meeting place for the youth of the world, a place where, gradually, the ignorance of each other in which people live will disappear.

Sport produces physical enjoyment … The intoxication of the wave, the gallop, the struggle, or the trapeze is just as strong as conventional drunkenness … It calms the senses not only through fatigue, but through satisfaction, as well.

I was advanced in history and especially in Roman history. My mother, who gave me lessons which her tenderness perhaps rendered too easy, possessed these matters on her fingertips.

Sport teaches man 'wise rules which will give his effort the maximum intensity without impairing the balance of his health.'

Stadiums are being built unwisely all over the place … Almost all the stadiums built in recent years are the result of local and, too often, commercial interests, not Olympic interests at all.

Once the athlete stops placing delight in his own efforts above all else … his ideals become tainted.

Education must be a preface to life. The man will be free; the child must also be free. The point is to teach the child to use his freedom and to understand its significance.

Of course, athletes know the price of good muscular health and the strength of the contentment that it provides, but it is not enough to create the total joy in which another element plays a part: altruism.

Olympism did not reappear within the context of modern civilization in order to play a local or temporary role. The mission entrusted to it is universal and timeless. It is ambitious. It requires all space and all time.

Olympism, a doctrine of the fraternity of the body and the mind, and asceticism, a doctrine of the enmity between them ... are destined to clash.

We have set our sights on the heights that restored Olympism can and must achieve.

Times are still hard, but the dawn now breaking is the dawn of the day after a storm; toward noon, the sky will brighten and the rosy ears of grain will fill the arms of the harvesters once again.

Gratitude is among the virtues most easily practiced. It is also a feeling most easily expressed.

The Games bring together 'thousands of young athletes for whom the Olympic laurels constitute the supreme sporting ambition.'

I would welcome most warmly an interruption in hostilities in the midst of war between armed opponents, in order to celebrate athletic, fair and courteous (Olympic) Games.

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