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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"The trick with hip-hop-hip-hop is a sport. The only music that's really, really close to a sport. It starts off, "My DJ's better than yours. I can out-rap you, I can out-dance you, my graffiti piece is better than you." It's very competitive."
"Fitness has always been one of the top priorities in my life because that's the way I grew up, with soccer being the sport of choice."
"What they call "play" (gym, travel, sports) looks like work."
"It's just strange to think that so much of our enjoyment from sports comes from the elevation of arbitrary differences."
"Jenny Simpson loses her shoe in the women's fifteen hundred, with a lap and a half to go, destroying her chances to repeat as world champion, and she gives the most gracious interview afterward about how she's had a wonderful career already. Great for Jenny Simpson. Bad for the sport! We need drama!"
"David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon."
"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?"
"A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched."
"I don't like Larry Merchant. He thinks he knows everything about a sport that he was never in. He walks around with papers and studies what he writes, he just pisses you off."
"I did everything when I started. In Miami I did news, I did weather, I did sports, I did disk-jockeying. And I did a sports talk show every week - every Saturday night."
"Ovid lies here, the poet, skilled in love's gentle sport; By his own talents he worked his undoing. Oh, you who pass by, if ever you have loved, Think it not a burden to wish him calm repose."
"Learn to swim. It is a sport all the peasants can play."
"I've always thought basketball was the best sport, although it wasn't the sport I was best at. It was just the most fun to watch."
"The fuel for the sports fan is the ability to have private theories."
"I have to keep myself in check when I go to the kids' sports events. I sit waaay in the back. I make sure I don't do too much cheering, you know what I mean? I'm still not quite adjusted to this modern school of thought: Oh, it doesn't matter who wins. I'm not all the way there yet, but I accept it from the back row."
"I know I could be the host of 'SportsCenter' in two years if I changed my show today to sports."
"Winelibrary.tv was about building personal brand equity. It was a business move. Now, it was totally surrounded by a passion for wine, but I very much gave a lot of thought to doing a sports-video blog instead."
"Smoking is, if not my life, then at least my hobby. I love to smoke. Smoking is fun. Smoking is cool. Smoking is, as far as I am concerned, the entire point of being an adult. It makes growing up genuinely worthwhile. I am quite well aware of the hazards of smoking. Smoking is not a healthful pastime, it is true. Smoking is indeed no bracing dip in the ocean, no strenuous series of calisthenics, no two laps around the reservoir. On the other hand, smoking has to its advantage the fact that is a quiet pursuit. Smoking is, in effect a dignified sport."
"My mom played every sport possible. My dad is 'extremely' competitive. You can't even play Ping-Pong with him."
