Athlete quotes
1.7K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"A fan is always an outsider. Most sportswriters are not, by this definition, fans. They capitalize on access to athletes. They spoke to Kobe last night, and Kobe says his finger is going to be fine. They spent three days fly-fishing with Brett Favre in March, and Brett says he's definitely coming back for another season."
"If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers."
"Track is full of the absolute nicest and most polite athletes in all of sports, and where does it get us?"
"Coaches are okay, I guess, but I prefer to do things my own way."
"The writer ... an athlete required to break the four-minute mile every morning."
"The office of president requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, the endurance of an early Christian."
"Maybe you can't play over your head at all. Maybe it's just potential you never knew you had."
"Being an artist is like being an athlete. You have to be in there every day, keeping in shape. You have to be fearless. You have to be confident, and if you start getting thrown by criticism or esthetic terminology, you're going to fall off the balance beam and hit your head and do some injury."
"I just want you guys to see it also. To see what type of words that are said toward me, and towards us as professional athletes. Everybody thinks it is a bed of roses and it's not."
"The letter from Dan Gilbert, the booing of the Cleveland fans, the jerseys being burned -- seeing all that was hard for them. My emotions were more mixed. It was easy to say, 'OK, I don't want to deal with these people ever again.' But then you think about the other side. What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left? How would I react? I've met with Dan, face-to-face, man-to-man. We've talked it out. Everybody makes mistakes. I've made mistakes as well. Who am I to hold a grudge?"
"The modern athlete is an individual corporation. I'm not quite sure it's very good for sport, or good for team work, or those different things that sport says it's about. This is about business."
"Think of yourself as an athlete. I guarantee you it will change the way you walk, the way you work, and the decisions you make about leadership, teamwork, and success."
"Anybody who is a professional athlete who has a social media account on any of the networks, when they sign up for that account, they subject themselves to all of the criticisms and all of the praises that may or may not be out there. So you can't get on social media and complain about the people because that's what you know you're dealing with. You have to hear it. You don't have to respond. Me personally, I don't respond to the negativity. It's gonna be there. I read it. It keeps me grounded."
"There is only one thing that makes any one athlete better than another, his heart. We all put our underwear on feet first, so we are all human."
"When Babe Didrickson Zaharias, often called the 'athletic phenomenon of all time,' won the British woman's gold tournament, people said of her what they had said many times before: "Oh, she's an automatic champion, a natural athlete." When Babe started golfing in earnest thirteen years ago she hit as many as 1,000 balls in one afternoon, playing until her hands were so sore they had to be taped."
"I think no athlete wants to end his career on an injury."
"We have become more and more not a nation of athletes but a nation of spectators."
"Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?"
"Willpower is that thing CEOs and professional athletes tell us they used to make it to the top."
"As an athlete, I was never really comfortable with being a celebrity."
