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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"You have to remember that no matter how big your goals or how many you have, there are going to be times when you miss by a little bit. You have to be realistic and flexible. One reason I have so many smaller goals is that even if my big goals don't happen, I've still achieved so much along the way, I don't feel the loss."
"Acting is a sport, like a game of tennis, and you and your opponent take turns setting the level of play."
"I think sometimes when it comes to sports, and especially relationships between players and coaches, that people lose track, lose a sense of reality."
"Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves. The great difference between sport and art is that sport, like a sonnet, forces beauty within its own system. Art, on the other hand, cyclically destroys boundaries and breaks free."
"There are three great international team sports in Australia: cricket, rugby (two codes), and Pom-bashing. But the greatest of these is the last, and it is time we prepared ourselves for the greatest celebration of Pom-bashing since Bodyline, the 1930s cricket tour that became an international incident. That one rankles to this day and is otherwise known as the longest whinge in sporting history."
"Do you play football?' Brandon asks. 'No.' 'Baseball?' 'Nope.' Brandon is on a roll and won't stop until he's found the answer he's looking for. 'Tennis?' 'That would be a nada' 'Then what sport do you play?' Carlos puts down his food. Oh, no. He's got a rebellious gleam in his eye as he says, 'The horizontal tango.' ...Alex stands and says through chlenched teeth, 'Carlos let's talk. In private. Ahora.' ....Brandon turns to my dad with big, innocent eyes. 'Daddy, do you know how to do the horizontal tango?"
"The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport.""
"Poetry is play. I'd even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football."
"I knew I was never going to play professional sport, but I loved playing and I went to all the games I could afford to."
"Life and sports cannot be separated; they are one."
"Run and become. Become and run. Run to succeed in the outer world. Become to proceed in the inner world."
"Whirlyball is only the most awesome sport on the planet! It's like bumper cars plus lacrosse meets basketball."
"I actually don't prepare for onscreen nudity. I really believe that you have to be comfortable with your own body and unless the role is directed to a certain physicality and you're playing a sports person, then obviously you've got to train for it, but I just try and do things that make me happy and comfortable in my own skin, so I've gotten into yoga quite a lot."
"Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football."
"Sports isn't just a part of life. It's not life itself."
"I wanted to feel good about the way I looked. I didn't understand why style had to be sacrificed for sports technology. I found when going to the gym women were wearing their own tees, without the technology. I started to think, does it make you run faster if you wear that terrible color or sweat less if you wear that horrible fabric? And I challenged it, and the answers were not there to why we were being given poor design work. It was something I wanted to bring to women's wardrobes."
"Character grows in the soil of experience with the fertilization of example, the moisture of ambition, and the sunshine of satisfaction. Character cannot be purchased, bargained for, inherited, rented or imported from afar. It must be home-grown. Purely intellectual development without commensurate internal character development makes as much sense as putting a high-powered sports car in the hands of a teenager who is high on drugs. Yet all too often in the academic world, that's exactly what we do by not focusing on the character development of young people."
"Whether you're on a sports team, in an office or a member of a family, if you can't trust one another there's going to be trouble."
""You can buy a person's hand, but you can't buy their heart. His heart is where his enthusiasm, his loyalty is. You can buy his back, but you can't buy his brain. That's where his creativity is, his ingenuity, his his resourcefulness.""
"The silliest and most tendentious of baseball writing tries to wrest profundity from the spectacle of grown men hitting a ball with a stick by suggesting linkages between the sport and deep issues of morality, parenthood, history, lost innocence, gentleness, and so on, seemingly ad infinitum . (The effort reeks of silliness because baseball is profound all by itself and needs no excuses; people who don't know this are not fans and are therefore unreachable anyway."
