“If you want to grow a beard like mine, the only thing I can tell you is that you have to have patience. You just have to let it grow.”
― Daniel Bryan
“For some reason, the fans got behind me, and I don’t know exactly why that is. I wasn’t supposed to main event WrestleMania XXX, but the fans were so vocal about it that the fans had no choice but to put me in the match. I’ve had a lot of lucky breaks.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I used to be vegan. I’m not anymore, but I don’t eat hardly any meat. But it’s nice for me to go to a place like Chipotle where I can get some fresh veggies, some brown rice, some black beans, and all that kind of stuff.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Sometimes, things just fall into your lap, and that’s pretty incredible.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I was very good in school, and my parents really would have really liked me to go to college. Instead, I went on this random journey to go be a professional wrestler.”
― Daniel Bryan
“With ladder matches, you can’t expect anything other than craziness.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I love sweets. Like, every week of my life, I’ve had a cheat day.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I really don’t know life without wrestling.”
― Daniel Bryan
“The thing that I have to stay away from is sweets. I have a horrible sweet tooth. It’s just the worst.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’ve never really been a character on TV. I think, if possible, you want to portray yourself. If you’re in a situation where you’re supposed to react, you need to react.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m pretty much friendly and compassionate to everybody. But not to people in the ring.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I love wrestling, but to wrestle just one style for the rest of my life seems like it would really hold me down creatively.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I would define the new aspects of fatherhood like this: It is 75 percent amazing and 25 percent demoralizing. I think any new parent can understand exactly what I’m talking about.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Me, Shinsuke Nakamura, and Lyoto Machida, former UFC Light Heavyweight Champion, all shared a two-bedroom apartment together.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m bigger now than when I was eating meat. My lifts in the gym are better. I’m in better shape.”
― Daniel Bryan
“A lot of people thought you couldn’t be a top-level athlete as a vegan, but people like Mac Danzig and Jake Shields are proving that’s wrong. And it’s better for me as a performer.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My diet is very kale-heavy. It’s so nutrient-dense. I stay away from fake processed stuff.”
― Daniel Bryan
“WWE doesn’t owe us anything.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Sometimes there’s cities where it’s just hard to find healthy food. You just have to be prepared.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I loved playing football, but I hated the games because it’s a lot of pressure. I just loved putting on the pads and hitting my friends.”
― Daniel Bryan
“If you watch dogs play, they run and they fight, but they don’t fight to hurt each other. They just play. And that’s been me my entire life.”
― Daniel Bryan
“You have to realize that a lot of life is just fortune and the ebbs of flows of what goes on.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I wasn’t a great athlete.”
― Daniel Bryan
“That is one of the coolest things about WWE and wrestling in general. The fans have this very unique voice and this very unique power, and in no other sport and no other form of entertainment can the fans make their voices heard and it effect change.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I feel like a lot of fans would like to see me with the heavyweight championship.”
― Daniel Bryan
“With wrestling, you can’t describe how that connection with an audience happens. I can’t teach anybody how that happens. The bad things that have happened to me in WWE have made that connection stronger.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m definitely an underdog.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I would like to do something to help people and help the world.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My passion is the wrestling.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I think fans always want something new, but they want somebody who can deliver – to go out there and really entertain them and have good matches.”
― Daniel Bryan
“When I was in high school, I started getting into Japanese wrestling. For me to watch those matches, I had to order VHS tapes through catalogues, and these tapes were, like, $20 each.”
― Daniel Bryan
“If it weren’t for the Internet, WWE probably wouldn’t even know my name. If I had to rely on ‘Pro Wrestling Illustrated’ to get my name out there, it would have been a much more difficult road.”
― Daniel Bryan
“With my history of concussions, the WWE wants to protect me, so I’ve had to take a lot of neurological testing.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My mind thinks in wrestling. As I’m thinking of things and my mind is being creative, it constantly keeps going back to wrestling. That’s my inspiration, and to not be able to express that puts me in a spot where I almost don’t know what to do with myself.”
― Daniel Bryan
“People have said to me, ‘It must be nice to prove so many people wrong,’ but I’ve never really cared about proving anything to anybody else.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I always feel like I wasn’t the best trainer, because I’m really good at teaching people stuff, but I’m not good if people aren’t super psyched – if they’re not like me.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I loved wrestling in Philly. It was such an exciting time in my life. That really helped me grow and think differently. It was also just a lot of fun.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Miz and I have known each other for a long time, and we really know, like, how to get at each other’s nerves.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I will say this about the Miz: Even though I don’t like his wrestling style, he is a very hard worker. I have a huge amount of respect for him, and I want him to do well.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I keep trying to convince people that I’m OK to wrestle, and I think that’s probably the hard part. A lot of times I’m trying to convince myself, too, that I can wrestle. It’s really hard, because the concussion issue is very subjective, and that’s the part that a lot of people don’t understand.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Wrestling is more of a creative outlet, and especially for somebody like me, I view it as my creative outlet. Not all WWE superstars and not all wrestlers view it that way, but that’s how I view it, and that’s one of the ways my mind works creatively.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I always think of it in terms of music. You’re not always going to be a huge rock star in music, but musicians can play until the day they die. With sports, it’s different. You can’t always do it until the very end, and that’s a hard reality of sports.”
― Daniel Bryan
“The blessings wrestling has given me have allowed me to find some new passions, but it’s really hard when you’ve got that first love, and nothing really replaces it.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My wife and I are very blessed. I am very grateful for the life that we lead.”
― Daniel Bryan
“When I first got to WWE, the head of talent relations was John Laurinaitis, who is now my father-in-law, and the first thing I thought when I saw everything that he had to do is, I thought, ‘I would never, in a million years, ever want that job. You could not pay me enough money to have that job.’”
― Daniel Bryan
“I feel like I’m not the greatest general manager in the history of general managers, but I do OK, and I’m learning as I go. I try to just do my best with it.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I think one of the things that really endeared me to people was that people got to view more aspects of my personality than most because of the different things that I did within WWE.”
― Daniel Bryan
“In combat sports, personalities are what draw.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao was one of the worst boxing matches I’ve ever seen, but millions of people watched it because of the personalities involved.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m having a really hard time with this retirement thing and not having wrestling.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I think whatever you have in your life, my opinion is that if you know that there’s something wrong, you try to fix it.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Smaller wrestlers are built for more exciting matches.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I like Everton. If I’m going to cheer for that kind of football team, I’m going to cheer for Everton. But the Seahawks are my passion.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Every year, I say the Seahawks are going to win the Super Bowl. There’s no doubt in my mind every single year. And you have to keep in mind this was well before the Seahawks were good. This was, like, 2-14, drafting-Rick-Mirer Seahawks. I would still be saying they were going to win the Super Bowl.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’ve lifted weights ever since I was a teenager, but I started going more towards the Olympic weightlifting style, which is clean and jerk.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My brain is – essentially, you take any college football player in the country, because I have had multiple, multiple concussions. I had 10 documented concussions, four post-concussion seizures and so, but, with that said, my brain is no worse than your average college football player’s brain, right?”
― Daniel Bryan
“My health is 100% more important than coming back to wrestling. Being a good father is more important than going out there and expounding on my belief that doing more hammerlocks in wrestling is good for the business!”
― Daniel Bryan
“One of the wonderful things about wrestling, to me, is that you can protect people who have had head injuries.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I would read a lot about how to be a dad. I had never changed a diaper before we had Birdie.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Seeing your baby in pain and seeing them crying and that sort of thing, and you’re tired, and you can do nothing about it – that’s, like, one of the most demoralizing things I can think of.”
― Daniel Bryan
“The best parenting advice I actually got was from Shane McMahon. He was great with me when Brie was pregnant and all that. He said, ‘When you have that baby, make sure you take care of Brie first.’”
― Daniel Bryan
“A lot of people don’t understand how hard the girls on ‘Total Divas’ work. They’re on the road, the same as the rest of us, and then when they get home, they’ve got to be filming this whole time.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My biggest concern with the whole deal with ‘Total Divas’ and with WWE – and, you know, they want you to be engaged with social media and all this kind of stuff – I don’t want to live my life to entertain other people.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I love wrestling, and I love the entertainment aspect of wrestling, but the rest of my life, I just want to be able to live and enjoy my life. I don’t want to be living it essentially for other people’s entertainment.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I don’t want to live my life to entertain other people. I have other things that I’d like to do.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m not somebody who is genetically gifted when it comes to facial hair.”
― Daniel Bryan
“William Regal has been the most influential person in my entire career.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I have to look at my career as ‘it was what it was,’ but I do wish there was more of it.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Part of me wants to stay involved in wrestling, because I love it. But the thing I loved most about it was the wrestling part of it. I didn’t get into it to be famous or to be a TV star: I got into it because I loved the act of wrestling.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m into environmental and ecological issues, so maybe that is an avenue to go down.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’m a terrible actor. I would suck in films! The only way I would do well is if I was playing myself, which is what I did in my career.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I went from being a guy who was sparingly being used on television to being the World Heavyweight Champion and the focus of a lot of the storylines on Smackdown.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I have no problem with people eating meat. I would just like it, for the people who do eat meat, for the animals to be treated better. To be treated humanely. Cows in pastures living the life that they’re supposed to live. I have no problem with that.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I like having a bunch of different experiences. I don’t want to do just one thing for the rest of my life.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I like going to Japan where they treat it like a real sport. I like doing the entertainment stuff with the WWE. I really like doing the small venue stuff, like Ring of Honor, because everything is so intimate. There’s different feelings and different experiences, and you have to be good at different things to do all of that.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Wrestling is something that nothing else can replace for me.”
― Daniel Bryan
“WWE was an opportunity to wrestle in front of thousands – in 2013, I did 227 matches, and almost all of them were in front of more than three or four thousand people, with a high of 70,000 plus. It was an incredible experience to be part of that.”
― Daniel Bryan
“People who like hard-hitting wrestling and action, they’ll like me.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I don’t do really well in cities, which is crazy given that we’re flying in and out of these major cities every week.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I get this anxiety in cities and places like that. When you grow up in kind of a small town and when you grow up around a lot of green and trees and nature and that sort of thing, sometimes I think it’s a little mentally disconcerting to be around this concrete.”
― Daniel Bryan
“One of the autobiographies I really liked was Bob Dylan’s. It was interesting because he didn’t do it in a linear fashion.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I spent a lot of time over in England wrestling at Butlins holiday camps for Brian Dixon and All Star Wrestling.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I always try to live in the moment.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Wrestling is different to me. As I talk to other wrestlers, wrestling seems a little different to me than it does to a lot of them. To me, it’s about an artistic performance and about honing my artistic performance in pursuit of these minute moments of perfection. These little encapsulations. And none of them are ever perfect.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’ve always respected and appreciated Punk, but we never really hung out. We came from the same route, but we didn’t necessarily hang out in the same circles. I’ve always had a great appreciation and respect for his hard work.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I think of Bret Hart as somebody who held the Intercontinental championship like it was the World Heavyweight championship. Every title match he was in felt important, like it was the most important thing on the show. The way he carried himself and the matches he had, it was just everything I thought a champion should be.”
― Daniel Bryan
“What we do is entertainment. We entertain people. Sometimes we inspire people, but sometimes we are just a way to fill their time.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I didn’t really grow up playing video games. I had an original Nintendo after the original Nintendo was cool.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My No. 1 dream match is Brock Lesnar. And I want that to be a WrestleMania match. I don’t know if the WWE will ever let that happen, because they might be afraid he might legitimately hurt me pretty bad.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’d like to to do a major pay-per-view match with Seth Rollins. I’d love do a major pay-per-view match with Stardust.”
― Daniel Bryan
“As you write about your life, there’s a lot of things that you think about that you regret. It’s interesting, because one of the things I regret the most is spending so much time focused on wrestling as opposed to focusing on my family.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’ve always thought Shawn Michaels’s story is fascinating.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I’ve been wrestling since I was 18 years old. And within the first five months of my wrestling career, I’d already had three concussions. And for years after that, I would get a concussion here and there, and it gets to the point that when you’ve been wrestling for 16 years, that adds up to a lot of concussions.”
― Daniel Bryan
“To me, the funnest part of wrestling is evolving. If you stay the same all the time, you’re eventually going to be left behind.”
― Daniel Bryan
“When I watch myself, I see nothing but faults, like, ‘This I need to do different, this I need to do different,’ and so if there comes a point in time where I’m like, ‘Man, this whole thing is just getting really stale,’ I am not opposed to being the bad guy again.”
― Daniel Bryan
“Being a bad guy is fun for me.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I am a big Seth Rollins fan and have been for a long period of time.”
― Daniel Bryan
“My favorite wrestler growing up was Dean Malenko. He was a very technical wrestler, and when I trained with Shawn Michaels, he wasn’t that kind of a technical wrestler. So, when I finally met Regal in 2001, he was that kind of a wrestler, and all of a sudden, I could ask him things, and he would know what I was talking about and how to do it.”
― Daniel Bryan
“I don’t want to be away from wrestling even a little.”
― Daniel Bryan
“When I was around nine, my parents took me to my first live event, which was a WWE show with Ultimate Warrior. From then on, I loved it.”
― Daniel Bryan
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