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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"I want to make sure I don't interfere with the success of that team next year. I don't see any way I could go to practice like most of 'em do, and not hurt the team. I'd go nuts if I tried doing that."
"I didn't have a thing to do with picking a coach, and didn't want to. But I didn't think they'd pick one I didn't like."
"It's been years since I've had a real input in the game anyway. For this game, I've just tried to keep all the other stuff away from the players and coaches."
"Everybody's got pretty good players now, more players than there've ever been. If you play poorly, you're going to get beat."
"Every time a player goes out there, at least 20 people have some amount of influence on him. His mother has more influence than anyone. I know because I played, and I loved my mama."
"I'm happy with the coach we have. I think any one of the ones I asked them to consider would've been good."
"I don't have any ideas; my coaches have them. I just pass the ideas on and referee the arguments."
"[When asked how someone 6'3" had dared take up golf:] I was too tall to make the chess team in my high school, so I tried golf."
"There's no gain, without pain."
"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close- at least at the lighter weight divisions- but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful- a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., play) is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion)."
"Skiing is my favorite sport, because, that's the only sport that is actually better to watch the worst the person is at it. "That guy won a gold medal in the Olympics" "Oh yeah, that's cool, i wanna watch the fat guy" "Come on dude, you can take that hill""
"The greatest communication skill is paying value to others."
"Habits start out as off-hand remarks, magazine advertisements, friendly hints, experiments - like flimsy cobwebs with little substance. They grow with practice, layer by layer - thought on thought - fused with imagination and emotion until they become like steel cables - unbreakable. Habits are attitudes which grow from cobwebs into cables that control your everyday life. Self-discipline alone can make or break a habit. Self discipline alone can effect a permanent change in your self image and in you. Self-discipline achieves goals. Self discipline is not 'doing without,' it is 'doing within.'"
"The integrity and self-esteem gained from winning the battle against extremity are the richest treasures in my life"
""I have three messages," said the breathless Nyad."One is we should never ever give up. Two is you are never too old to chase your dreams. And three is it looks like a solitary sport but it takes a team.""
"There's nothing wrong with options. Options are everywhere. In movies, in sports. Options is not a dirty word. I need to pay my overheads, you know. I invest a lot of money developing a fighter and then I deserve to reap the rewards."
"One of the things that I noticed in war was how difficult it was for our soldiers, at first, to realize that there are no rules to war. Our men were raised in sports, where a referee runs a football game, or an umpire a baseball game, and so forth."
"If you're studying for an exam you're not thinking about the results. If you're always worried about the results, you can't study a lot. So to be engaged and detached from the outcome is excellent. Excellence is behavior. I mean, isn't that what martial arts is about? And that's what meditation is about, that's what, in many ways, sports are about."
"Eventually you won't think of 'the Internet business.' You'll think of it more like news, weather, sports, but even that taxonomy isn't clear."
"I find golf very relaxing. It's a way to get away from work and get outside. It's a lot of fun, and once you get going it's almost kind of addictive."
