Sports quotes
8.2K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sports — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"People see it [boxing] as a physical contact sport, but it's not. It's really a spiritual one of will against will. Who wants it the most? How much is he willing to take - and dish out - to get it? It's like fighting is 10 percent physical and 90 percent emotional."
"If you try to fight the course, it will beat you."
"I call tennis the McDonald's of sport - you go in, they make a quick buck out of you, and you're out."
"If I pass away one day, I am happy because I tried to do my best. My sport allowed me to do so much because it's the biggest sport in the world."
"There's no use fussing on a boy who doesn't have any ability."
"Either black people end up being the best in sports, or else it's show business. You know, we all got rhythm."
"This must be how the guys in Space Jam felt when MJ gave them their powers back through that old basketball."
"We talkin' about practice?"
"Most bodybuilders only have a hazy notion of what they want to look like. They do not say, 'I am going to be a winner.' The negative impulses around the gym can be incredible. I would hear bodybuilders complaining, 'Oh,no! Not another set!' That destroyed them. I have always believed that if you're training for nothing, you're wasting your effort!"
"I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game."
"Wrestling is a team sport, and an individual sport all rolled into one."
"As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport."
"By the time you know what to do, you're too old to do it."
"In my later years I have sought to become simpler, straighter and purer in my handling of the language. I've had many writing heroes, writers who have influenced me. Of the ones still alive, I can think of E.B. White. I certainly admire the pure, crystal stream of his prose. When I was very young as a sportswriter I knowingly and unashamedly imitated others. I had a series of heroes who would delight me for a while and I'd imitate them--Damon Runyon, Westbrook Pegler, Joe Williams."
"For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football's place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority."
"The day when I am satisfied with what I have, will be the day I retire from the sport."
"The wrestling, even though I would only wrestle for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and it would look like that was the only time I was in it, was really a 24-hour job. Keeping yourself alive, reinventing yourself, staying physically in shape, the traveling, all the other commitments with being a wrestler, it was a crossover situation where it became sports entertainment and you actually became a media star, so it was very demanding."
"Longevity is having a chronic disease - and taking care of it."
"But sports carried me away from being in a gang, or being associated with drugs. Sports was my way out."
"The great thing about sports is you constantly have to prove yourself. You constantly have to go out there and do it, day in and day out."
