Sports quotes, aphorisms and ideas on athletes, life, perseverance and competition by the World of English blog.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting… there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.
George Orwell
Sports do not build character. They reveal it.
John Wooden
The hardest skill to acquire in this sport is the one where you compete all out, give it all you have, and you are still getting beat no matter what you do. When you have the killer instinct to fight through that, it is very special.
Eddie Reese
Sport is a preserver of health.
Hippocrates
The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.
Friedrich Nietzsche
An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.
Emil Zatopek
For athletes, the Olympics are the ultimate test of their worth.
Mary Lou Retton
I don’t think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
Tom Stoppard
The essence of sports is that while you’re doing it, nothing else matters, but after you stop, there is a place, generally not very important, where you would put it.
Roger Bannister
The breakfast of champions is not cereal, it’s the opposition.
Nick Seitz
Every sport pretends to a literature, but people don’t believe it of any other sport but their own.
Alistair Cooke
Good is not good when better is expected.
Vin Scully
Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong
Sport strips away personality, letting the white bone of character shine through. Sport gives players an opportunity to know and test themselves.
Rita Mae Brown
A lifetime of training for just ten seconds.
Jesse Owens
All sports are games of inches.
Dick Ritger
I always turn to the sports section first. The sports page records people’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.
Earl Warren
Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
Letitia Landon
Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
Lewis Mumford
Most talented players don’t always succeed. Some don’t even make the team. It’s more what’s inside.
Brett Favre
If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf.
Bob Hope
Gold medals aren’t really made of gold. They’re made of sweat, determination, and a hard-to-find alloy called guts.
Dan Gable
Tennis is a perfect combination of violent action taking place in an atmosphere of total tranquillity.
Billie Jean King
Given the nature of sports, its not surprising that athletes have had some inspiring and motivational things to say about hard work, leadership, perseverance, winning, and much more.
Carl William Brown
One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.
Knute Rockne
Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see – not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
Lewis H. Lapham
The five S’s of sports training are: stamina, speed, strength, skill, and spirit; but the greatest of these is spirit.
Ken Doherty
Stretch pants – the garment that made skiing a spectator sport.
Author Unknown
There may be people that have more talent than you, but theres no excuse for anyone to work harder than you do.
Derek Jeter
Perseverance is an excellent key word for good sport results, but unfortunately it is not the only one.
Carl William Brown
Always make a total effort, even when the odds are against you.
Arnold Palmer
In sport, mental imagery is used primarily to help you get the best out of yourself in training and competition. The developing athletes who make the fastest progress and those who ultimately become their best make extensive use of mental imagery. They use it daily as a means of directing what will happen in training, and as a way of pre-experiencing their best competition performances.
Terry Orlick
You have to do something in your life that is honorable and not cowardly if you are to live in peace with yourself.
Larry Brown
An athlete cannot run with money in his pockets. He must run with hope in his heart and dreams in his head.
Emil Zatopek
Never give up, never give in, and when the upper hand is ours, may we have the ability to handle the win with the dignity that we absorbed the loss.
Doug Williams
Never give up! Failure and rejection are only the first step to succeeding.
Jim Valvano
Why is luge a sport? You dress up like a giant sperm and go sledding really fast. That’s hardly athletic. Phallic and sexy, yes. But hardly athletic.
Jessica Park
Sports teaches you character, it teaches you to play by the rules, it teaches you to know what it feels like to win and lose-it teaches you about life.
Billie Jean King
Sports is the common denominator in the world that brings everyone together. If there’s any one place in the world where there is equality, it is probably sports. That was something that didn’t always exist. We’ve come a long way in sports. Why can’t society use sports as a way to bring people together and create change?
Stephen M. Ross
It doesn’t matter whether you are pursuing success in business, sports, the arts, or life in general: The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline.
Harvey Mackay
In sports, you simply aren’t considered a real champion until you have defended your title successfully. Winning it once can be a fluke; winning it twice proves you are the best.
Althea Gibson
We live in a world where sports have the potential to bridge the gap between racism, sexism and discrimination. The 2012 Olympic Games was a great start but hopefully what these games taught us is that if women are given an opportunity on an equal playing field the possibilities for women are endless.
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
All of the sports have a safety net, but boxing is the only sport that has none. So when the fighter is through, he is through. While he was fighting his management was very excited for him, but now that he is done, that management team is moving on.
Gerry Cooney
Sports play a very important role in consolidating the national strength, adding lustre to the country’s prestige and honour, inspiring people with national dignity and pride, and imbuing the whole society with revolutionary mettle. Kim Jong-un
Team sports are very important for shaping personalities. It’s important that kids understand the mentality behind playing team sports and playing for one another and playing with friends.
Brian O’Driscoll
The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.
Pierre de Coubertin
The Olympics remain the most compelling search for excellence that exists in sport, and maybe in life itself.
Dawn Fraser
The first is to love your sport. Never do it to please someone else. It has to be yours.
Peggy Fleming
When anyone tells me I can’t do anything, I’m just not listening any more.
Florence Griffith Joyner
Sport is where an entire life can be compressed into a few hours, where the emotions of a lifetime can be felt on an acre or two of ground, where a person can suffer and die and rise again on six miles of trails through a New York City park. Sport is a theater where sinner can turn saint and a common man become an uncommon hero, where the past and the future can fuse with the present. Sport is singularly able to give us peak experiences where we feel completely one with the world and transcend all conflicts as we finally become our own potential.
George A. Sheehan
The problem with winter sports is that – follow me closely here – they generally take place in winter.
Dave Barry
If curling were easy, they’d call it hockey.
Author Unknown
Continuous effort — not strength or intelligence — is the key to unlocking our potential.
Liane Cardes
If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf.
Bob Hope
Champions keep playing until they get it right.
Billie Jean King
A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together!
Author Unknown
Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough… I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.
Dave Barry
Skiing: the art of catching cold and going broke while rapidly heading nowhere at great personal risk.
Author Unknown
Leadership, like coaching, is fighting for the hearts and souls of men and getting them to believe in you.
Eddie Robinson
You’re never a loser until you quit trying.
Mike Ditka
People in the States used to think that if girls were good at sports their sexuality would be affected. Being feminine meant being a cheerleader, not being an athlete. The image of women is changing now. You don’t have to be pretty for people to come and see you play. At the same time, if you’re a good athlete, it doesn’t mean you’re not a woman.
Martina Navratilova
When you win, say nothing, when you lose, say less.
Paul Brown
Ease brings sport and sport brings rest; For young and old, of all degrees, The mingled lot is best.
Joanna Baillie
I don’t feel right unless I have a sport to play or at least a way to work up a sweat.
Hank Aaron
The greatest efforts in sports came when the mind is as still as a glass lake.
Timothy Gallwey
There is a syndrome in sports called “paralysis by analysis.”
Arthur Ashe
There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
Roland Barthes
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
Ernest Becker
Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.
Bion (Greek bucolic poet)
Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
Decimus Junius Juvenalis
When we lose, I eat. When we win, I eat. I also eat when we’re rained out.
Tommy Lasorda
I’m fanatical about sport: there seems to me something almost religious about the fact that human beings can organise play, the spirit of play.
Simon Gray
When cerebral processes enter into sports, you start screwing up. It’s like the Constitution, which says separate church and state. You have to separate mind and body.
Bill Lee
Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.
Dave Barry
The sport of skiing consists of wearing three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes and equipment and driving two hundred miles in the snow in order to stand around at a bar and get drunk.
P.J. O’Rourke
Sports should always be fun.
Charles Mann
Any manager who can’t get along with a .400 hitter is crazy.
Joe McCarthy
In sports… you play from the time you’re eight years old, and then you’re done forever.
Joe Montana
One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than fifty preaching it.
Knute Rockne
In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
It’s a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.
Franklin P. Jones
Ice hockey is a form of disorderly conduct in which the score is kept.
Doug Larson
Fifty percent of life in the N.B.A. is sex. The other fifty percent is money.
Dennis Rodman
Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.
Ouida
Do you know what my favorite part of the game is? The opportunity to play.
Mike Singletary
Skiing: the art of catching cold and going broke while rapidly heading nowhere at great personal risk.
Author Unknown
I asked a ref if he could give me a technical foul for thinking bad things about him. He said, of course not. I said, well, I think you stink. And he gave me a technical. You can’t trust em.
Jim Valvano
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