Sports Quotes
Most popular sports quotes
If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
How a man plays the game shows something of his character; how he loses shows all of it.
Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.
First there are those who are winners and know they are winners. Then there are the losers who know they are the losers. Then there are those who are not winners but don't know it. They are the ones for me. They never quit trying. They are the soul of our game.
I have never recommended anybody to go into coaching, cause if they have enough on the ball, if they do without coaching, they should do without it. If they put as much work into it and spend as much time, the rewards are going to be much better in something else.
It's kind of hard to rally around a math class.
Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.
Losing is the great American sin.
If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.
Show me a good loser in professional sports and I'll show you an idiot.
Defeat is worse than death because you live with defeat.
I do not in the least object to a sport because it is rough.
The battle of waterloo was won on the playing field of Eton.
Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.
Competition in play teaches the love of the free spirit to excel by its own merit. A nation that has not forgotten how to play, a nation that fosters athletics, is a nation that is always holding up the high ideal of equal opportunity for all. Go back through history and find the nations that did not play and had no outdoor sports, and you will find nations of oppressed peoples.
Nice guys finish last.
In the field of sports you are more or less accepted for what you do rather than what you are.
Competition provides spice in life as well as in sports; it's only when the spice becomes the entire diet that the player gets sick.
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.
In America, it is sport that is the opiate of the masses.
Sport is something that does not matter, but is performed as if it did. In that contradiction lies its beauty.
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through.
What I know most surely about morality and the duty of man I owe to sport.
Sports is the toy department of life.
Giving your body a chance to exult, however you choose to do it, is the essence of sport.
The thing about sport, any sport, is that swearing is very much a part of it.
I...hate all sports as rabidly as a person who likes sports hates common sense.
Everything about sport is derived from the hunt: there is no sport in existence that does not base itself either on the chase or on aiming, the two key elements of primeval hunting.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Like alcohol, sports doesn't lie. What it reveals about a person under its influence was just hiding.
Upon the fields of friendly strife Are sown the seeds That, upon other fields, on other days Will bear the fruits of victory.
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
Sports figures are to the '70s what movie stars were to the '60s.
I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures.
Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic—in a word, moral—undertaking.
We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.
A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
A player who conjugates a verb in the first person singular cannot be part of the squad, he has to conjugate the verb in the first person plural. We. We want to conquer. We are going to conquer. Using the word "I" when you're in a group makes things complicated.
A tough day at the office is even tougher when your office contains spectator seating.
All a manager has to do is keep eleven players happy—the eleven in the reserves. The first team are happy because they are in the first team.
All sports are games of inches.
All sports for all people.
American professional athletes are bilingual; they speak English and profanity.
An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.
And that is the reason why this victory is great, because different players have made contributions to the win.
Andre Dawson has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren't we all?
Any time Detroit scores more than 100 points and holds the other team below 100 points they almost always win.
Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts.
As a manager, you always have a gun to your head. It's a question of whether there is a bullet in the barrel.
As athletes, we're used to reacting quickly. Here, it's 'come, stop, come, stop.' There's a lot of downtime. That's the toughest part of the day.
At least with me, the match starts much, much earlier than the actual match.
Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball, and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns.
Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
Bulls do not win bull fights. People do.
Champions keep playing until they get it right.
Do you know what my favourite part of the game is? The opportunity to play.
Every day you guys look worse and worse. And today you played like tomorrow.
Every individual has his own style, his own way of presenting himself on and off the field.
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don't believe it of any other sport but their own.
Fans are the only ones who really care. There are no free-agent fans.
Fans don't boo nobodies.
Finish last in your league and they call you Idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you Doctor.
Gold medals aren't really made of gold. They're made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.
Good, better, best. Never let it rest. Until your good is better and your better is best.
I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people's accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man's failures.
I am building a fire, and everyday I train, I add more fuel. At just the right moment, I light the match.
I believe every era has its significance and the same holds true for players and coaches.
I don't believe professional athletes should be role models. I believe parents should be role models .... It's not like it was when I was growing up. My mom and my grandmother told me how it was going to be. If I didn't like it, they said, 'Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out.' Parents have to take better control.
I don't know why people question the academic training of an athlete. Fifty per cent of the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their classes.
I don't know. I never smoked AstroTurf.
I don't think the discus will ever attract any interest until they let us start throwing them at one another.
I don't want to play golf. When I hit a ball, I want someone else to go chase it.
I hate losing and cricket being my first love, once I enter the ground it's a different zone altogether and that hunger for winning is always there.
I have never thought where I will go, or forced any targets on myself.
I just keep it simple. Watch the ball and play it on merit.
I wanted to have a career in sports when I was young, but I had to give it up. I'm only six feet tall, so I couldn't play basketball. I'm only 190 pounds, so I couldn't play football. And I have 20-20 vision, so I couldn't be a referee.
I would have thought that the knowledge that you are going to be leapt upon by half-a-dozen congratulatory, but sweaty team-mates would be inducement not to score a goal.
I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down.
If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they'd starve to death.
If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing you grandmother with her teeth out.
If horses can't eat it, I won't play on it.
If I lose at play, I blaspheme; if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So, God is always the loser.
If I weren't earning $3 million a year to dunk a basketball, most people on the street would run in the other direction if they saw me coming.
If one man is representing India in cricket, then yes, blame that person when things go wrong.
If only Hitler and Mussolini could have a good game of bowls once a week at Geneva, I feel that Europe would not be as troubled as it is.
If you got the game, you got the game. That's why Tiger Woods is out there playing golf with Greg Norman.
If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you're going to have problems. You'll be dead a lot.
If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball.
I'll let the racket do the talking.
I'm fanatical about sport: there seems to me something almost religious about the fact that human beings can organize play, the spirit of play.
I'm not buddy-buddy with the players. If they need a buddy, let them buy a dog.
I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok.
In play there are two pleasures for your choosing—the one is winning, and the other losing.
It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls.
It is all very well to say that a man should play for the pure love of the game. Perhaps he ought, but to the working man it is impossible.
It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans.
It's like going into a nuclear war with bows and arrows.
It's not whether you win or lose—but whether I win or lose.
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
Just give me 25 guys on the last year of their contracts; I'll win a pennant every year.
Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.
Life is about timing.
Losing streaks are funny. If you lose at the beginning, you get off to a bad start. If you lose in the middle of the season, you're in a slump. If you lose at the end, you're choking.
Most games are lost, not won.
Most people are in a factory from nine till five. Their job may be to turn out 263 little circles. At the end of the week they're three short and somebody has a go at them. On Saturday afternoons they deserve something to go and shout about.
Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second.
My only feeling about superstition is that it's unlucky to be behind at the end of the game.
Nobody roots for Goliath.
Nobody's a natural. You work hard to get good and then work to get better. It's hard to stay on top.
October is not only a beautiful month but marks the precious yet fleeting overlap of hockey, baseball, basketball, and football.
Officials are the only guys who can rob you and then get a police escort out of the stadium.
Olympism is the marriage of sport and culture.
People understand contests. You take a bunch of kids throwing rocks at random and people look askance, but if you go and hold a rock-throwing contest—people understand that.
Radio football is football reduced to its lowest common denominator. Shorn of the game's aesthetic pleasures, or the comfort of a crowd that feels the same way as you, or the sense of security that you get when you see that your defenders and goalkeeper are more or less where they should be, all that is left is naked fear.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting ... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
Show me a good loser, and I'll show you a loser.
Sport is a preserver of health.
Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves.
Sports are a microcosm of society.
Sports are too much with us. Late and soon, sitting and watching—mostly watching on television—we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes.
Sports is human life in microcosm.
The finish line is sometimes merely the symbol of victory. All sorts of personal triumphs take place before that point, and the outcome of the race may actually be decided long before the end.
The ball is man's most disastrous invention, not excluding the wheel.
The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it's the opposition.
The difference between the old ballplayer and the new ballplayer is the jersey. The old ballplayer cared about the name on the front. The new ballplayer cares about the name on the back.
The essence of sports is that while you're doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.
The fewer rules a coach has, the fewer rules there are for players to break.
The key is not the 'will to win'—everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.
The more I practice, the luckier I get.
The Russians have a weapon that can wipe out 280,000 Americans. That puts them exactly ten years behind Howard Cosell.
The trouble with referees is that they just don't care which side wins.
The umpire ... is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.
There isn't a single professional sports season now that doesn't go on at least a month too long. Baseball starts in football weather, and football in baseball weather, and basketball overlaps them both.
Thus so wretched is man that he would weary even without any cause for weariness ... and so frivolous is he that, though full of a thousand reasons for weariness, the least thing, such as playing billiards or hitting a ball, is sufficient enough to amuse him.
To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see—not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
We are inclined that if we watch a football game or baseball game, we have taken part in it.
When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It's like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.
When it comes to sports I am not particularly interested. Generally speaking, I look upon them as dangerous and tiring activities performed by people with whom I share nothing except the right to trial by jury.
Winning is overrated. The only time it is really important is in surgery and war.
Winning isn't overrated—it's your acceptance of being rated.
You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go. Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.
