The Art of Cycling Quotes

“Poetry in motion – there is no perfection, only life.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear that same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“More than cycling – and certainly more than thinking – having a child ties you once and for all to this world. Through his existence my fate is externalized. Spirit is made flesh, and the questions and anxieties that had once felt pressing suddenly recede into the darkness of irrelevance.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Entering into a relationship with the bike, I don’t just regard it with the disinterested detachment of an observer, I use it. And in return it takes me out of my head – re-enchanting life and putting me squarely back into the world of lived experience.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“the bicycle is unlike so many other things in the world and how it can dislodge us from the endless stream of technical distraction which has come to characterize modern life.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“However, climbs like these don’t simply demarcate fitness, but also the cyclical passage of time. No matter how your life might change, that particular climb – your climb – remains a touchstone. As people are born and others die, you ride past the same features of the landscape – bearing witness to its changes just as much as yours: in early spring, leaves emerge from well-known trees only to wither in the gutter in the fall. While, during the last throes of winter, the brown hillsides gradually return to green – silently announcing that life has renewed itself and the worst of the cold and darkness has passed.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“thinker who lauded the high mountains, and extolled the virtues of bravery, fresh air, and physical effort, there is simply no thinker better suited to the sport of cycling than Friedrich Nietzsche.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“how through a combination of rigorous thinking and the self-discipline of being an athlete, I might give ‘style to my life’ and in the process avoid the sort of spiritual death that seems to befall so many long before their biological one.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Like music, painting, or writing, cycling was an art, and becoming skillful was a pursuit with an ever-retreating horizon of proficiency which was shrouded in mystery.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“What cycling can do, if only for a moment, is to disabuse you of the idea that you’re a Cartesian mind trapped in a decaying body with limited knowledge of not just the world, but even of other people. As ephemeral as it may be, cycling has served to draw me out of my head and bridge the gulf between me and the world. In the freezing cold and sweltering heat – in the tactile feel of the handlebars in my hands, and the pain of exertion – I’m no longer a thinking subject in a world of objects, instead I merely am and all the abstractions of intellect simply fall away as so much noise.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“If you’re looking for a certain type of answer, in the end, the sound and the fury of being an athlete means absolutely nothing at all. But, if you listen hard enough – away from the cacophony of the crowd and attuned to a different, ineffable sort of murmur – you can discern something enigmatic. Something like life itself.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“I realized more and more with each passing day that no amount of thinking would save me.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“As the saying goes in the U.S. Marines about one’s rifle, but equally applicable to mass-produced bicycles – there are many like it, but this one is mine.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“If the world of professional cycling taught me anything, it’s that more often than not, life’s so-called winners are just the ones who’ve gotten away with the most.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“At the highest levels, sports aren’t healthy. They don’t as a matter of course prepare you for business success, for more fulfilling personal relationships, or to better deal with corporate ‘teammates.’ In reality, the analogy is far closer to having been an addict,”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Rather than leading towards any sort of true insight or authentic self-understanding, this way of conceiving what it is to be an athlete instead only perpetuates the unremitting competitiveness of twenty-first-century capitalism and distracts from any hope of ‘becoming what one is.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Sometimes it’s strange being me. I travel the world meeting people, I’m surrounded with friends and my life is full, but all the time I am confronted by a young man I have nothing in common with. He is me, but he is not me now. In fact, I have been me now for longer than I was him, but no one wants to know about me. —Eddy Merckx I must love being nothing. How horrible it would be if I were something! I must love my nothingness, love being a nothingness. —Simone Weil”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Less and less do I believe in being great at anything – in notions of being smarter, stronger, or better. On a long enough timeline, any success turns into its own sort of failure.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“the spiritual is not to be separated from the material, nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from habits of speech and thought which set the two apart, making it impossible to see that this – the immediate, everyday, and present experience – is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Translated into the terms of modern sports psychology these ‘peak experiences’ took place when I let go – the race that I was just ‘training through,’ or that for some reason or another didn’t matter was almost always when the sensations were the best. Indifferent to the outcome, the calm of my well-worn warm-up routine would give way to legs that turned the pedals with such inexplicable effortlessness that it felt as if I had been made to ride a bicycle. This isn’t to say I always won – that the sensations always correlated to the external result – but on race days like this I at least never got in my own way. On days like this I loved racing my bicycle.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Through a sincere, lasting engagement with nearly any activity or practice, you come to realize that in order to progress further, you must relinquish control.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Derived from the Greek, the word analysis literally means to loosen or tear apart, and while this way of seeing the world as a discrete set of problems can be fruitful, it can also introduce a sort of conceptual feedback which hinders the instinctual spontaneity required to be an athlete. And, as my improvement stalled and my disenchantment with Western philosophy increased, I began to wonder more and more about those who approached cycling not as a series of problems to be overcome, but as a state to be attained.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“In a society almost totally devoid of ritual, the way a cyclist pumps their tires, adjusts their helmet, or even carries a bike, takes on a graceful elegance which is charged with significance.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Just as music isn’t merely sound, but sound followed by intervals of silence, improvement isn’t work alone, but the right amount of work followed by rebuilding through rest and recovery. As the years went on, I realized that although I knew exactly how to will and push myself to the peaks, much to my detriment, I never mastered letting go and sliding into the valleys of recovery.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“doing nothing at all was somehow the most difficult thing in the world.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Psychedelic drugs were a shortcut to the realization that reality itself is little more than a social construct into which one is indoctrinated,”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“Filippo Marinetti – a fan of cycling – who wrote in the movement’s manifesto, ‘We affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed,’ or even Aldous Huxley who famously quipped, ‘Speed, it seems to me, provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“enriched by a new form of beauty: the beauty of speed,”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels

“The very idea of myself, of the identity I have done so much to cultivate is nothing more than a series of innumerable accidents and feedback loops not of my own making”
― James Hibbard, The Art of Cycling: Philosophy, Meaning, and a Life on Two Wheels