87 Inspirational Sports Quotes

Sports have always been a rich source of motivation and inspiration, pushing athletes and fans alike to strive for greatness. Whether you're seeking the drive to push through a challenging workout, the encouragement to pursue your dreams, or the wisdom to gain a new perspective on teamwork and perseverance, the right quote can make all the difference. In this post, we've curated a collection of the top 87 inspirational sports quotes to ignite your passion, foster your resilience, and remind you that with determination and hard work, anything is possible. Let's dive into these powerful words of wisdom from some of the greatest minds and athletes in sports history.

1. “I think all of us are looking for that which does not admit of bullshit . . . If you tell me you can bench press 450, hell, we'll load up the bar and put you under it. Either you can do it or you can't do it—you can't bullshit. Ultimately, sports are just about as close to what one would call the truth as it is possible to get in this world.” - Harry Crews

2. “Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? ” - Dave Barry

3. “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” - Erma Bombeck

4. “Winning isn't everything--but wanting to win is.” - Vince Lombardi

5. “It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.” - Hank Aaron

6. “There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” - Ernest Hemingway

7. “Guys care about sports teams. I'm not talking about simply rooting; I'm talking about a relationship that guys develop, a commitment to a sport team that guys take way more seriously than, for example, wedding vows.” - Dave Barry

8. “Baseball players are smarter than football players. How often do you see a baseball team penalized for too many men on the field? ” - Jim Bouton

9. “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” - Rodney Dangerfield

10. “In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.” - Eric Liddell

11. “Some seek the comfort of their therapist's office, other head to the corner pub and dive into a pint, but I chose running as my therapy.” - Dean Karnazes

12. “I haven't celebrated coming in No. 2 too many times.” - Mark Messier

13. “football is like life - it requires perserverance, self-denial, hard work, sacrifice, dedication and respect for authority.” - Vince Lombardi

14. “a lot of football success is in the mind. you must believe you are the best and then make sure that you are.” - Bill Shankly

15. “On the road we're somebody else's guests and we play in a way that they'renot going to forget we visited them.” - Knute Rockne

16. “Somebody once asked me if I ever went up to the plate trying to hit a home run. I said "sure, every time".” - Mickey Mantle

17. “I'll play baseball for the Army or fight for it, whatever they want me to do.” - Mickey Mantle

18. “Many people say I'm the best women's soccer player in the world. I don't think so. And because of that, someday I just might be.” - Mia Hamm

19. “Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart.” - Phil Jackson

20. “Revolution is a spectators sport. The majority will sit in the stands and watch the factions fight. At the end they will choose side with the team that is winning. ” - George Lincoln Rockwell

21. “Run and become.Become and run.Run to succeed in the outer world.Become to proceed in the inner world.” - Sri Chinmoy

22. “I'd only seen Julius play a few times, but he had that gift, that grace, those fingers like a goddamn medicine man. One time, when the tribal school traveled to Spokane to play this white high school team, Julius scored sixty-seven points and the Indians won by forty.I didn't know they'd be riding horses," I heard the coach of the white team say when I was leaving....Hey," I asked Adrian. "Remember Silas Sirius?"Hell," Adrian said. "Do I remember? I was there when he grabbed that defensive rebound, took a step, and flew the length of the court, did a full spin in midair, and then dunked that fucking ball. And I don't mean it looked like he flew, or it was so beautiful it was almost like he flew. I mean, he flew, period."I laughed, slapped my legs, and knew that I believed Adrian's story more as it sounded less true.Shit," he continued. "And he didn't grow no wings. He just kicked his legs a little. Held that ball like a baby in his hand. And he was smiling. Really. Smiling when he flew. Smiling when he dunked it, smiling when he walked off the court and never came back. Hell, he was still smiling ten years after that.” - Sherman Alexie

23. “If teams keep playing us this way, it's going to be like this” - Peyton Manning

24. “You have to give 100 percent in the first half of the game. If that isn't enough, in the second half, you have to give what's left.” - Yogi Berra

25. “if you gone come in second, you're just the first loser!” - Tiger Woods

26. “Whereas fanatic is usually a pejorative word, a Fan is someone who has roots somewhere.” - Simon Kuper

27. “Other than sports, only war and catastrophe can create this sort of national unity.” - Simon Kuper

28. “The building of publicly funded stadiums has become a substitue for anything resembling an urban policy.” - Dave Zirin

29. “I read that Monica Seles got stabbed. And although I have nothing against Monica Seles, I'm glad somebody in sports got stabbed. I like the idea of it; it's good entertainment. If we're lucky, it'll spread through sports. And show business, too! Wouldn't you like to see a guy jump up on stage and stab some famous singer? Especially a real shitty pop singer? Maybe they'll even start stabbing comedians. Fuck it, I'm ready! I never perform without my can of mace. I have a switchblade knife, too. I'll cut your eye out and go right on telling jokes.” - George Carlin

30. “Sports fans eat shit.” - George Carlin

31. “I sometimes rented a car and drove from event to event in Europe; a road trip was a great escape from the day-to-day anxieties of playing, and it kept me from getting too lost in the tournament fun house with its courtesy cars, caterers, locker room attendants, and such — all amenities that create a firewall between players and what you might call the 'real' world — you know, where you may have to read a map, ask a question in a foreign tongue, find a restaurant and read the menu posted in the window to make sure you're not about to walk into a joint that serves only exotic reptile meat.” - Patrick McEnroe

32. “Stay true to yourself and listen to your inner voice. It will lead you to your dream.” - James Ross

33. “Who else, when we stepped to the line in Torino, was going to be so mentally tough? Who else would have proven to himself that he could do anything he set out to do? In a sport that was always one tick away from being entirely out of control, who else would have done everything he could to take charge of the things he could-and should- control to put himself in position to excel?” - Apolo Ohno

34. “Defeated misery is what all sport is about, eventually, if you follow the story for long enough; all sportsmen know this.” - Nick Hornby

35. “The flow. Yeah. Knowing you could step on the court and make it happen. You practiced, sure. But then, when you walked out there, you could just go. You could flow, that was it: you created and you didn't totally know how. You just knew you could, so you did. It wasn't thinking and it wasn't imitating somebody else's moves, though you always looked carefully when you watched good players play. But when you played... it was something you couldn't explain. Neal used to know. It didn't come from thinking about it.” - Doug Wilhelm

36. “After joyfully working each morning, I would leave off around midday to challenge myself to a footrace. Speeding along the sunny paths of the Jardin du Luxembourg, ideas would breed like aphids in my head—for creative invention is easy and sublime when air cycles quickly through the lungs and the body is busy at noble tasks.” - Roman Payne

37. “Adversity causes some men to break; others to break records. ” - William Arthur Ward

38. “Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts. ” - Phil Jackson

39. “Baseball happens to be a game of cumulative tension but football, basketball and hockey are played with hand grenades and machine guns. ” - John Leonard

40. “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can't get you off. ” - Bill Veeck

41. “Baseball is drama with an endless run and an ever-changing cast.” - Joe Garagiola

42. “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer. ” - Ted Williams

43. “Don't play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty. ” - Harry Vardon

44. “If a team intimidate you physically and you let them, they've won.” - Mia Hamm

45. “i could never be a sports writer, unless my assignment was to write 'sports sports sports sports sports' for three pages” - Megan Boyle

46. “In the sweep of its appeal, its ability to touch every corner of humanity, football is the only game that needed to be invented.” - Bobby Charlton

47. “Greatness, whether athletic or otherwise, doesn’t come from those content on just being but from those who seek being the difference.” - Kirk Mango

48. “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances.The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.” - Kirk Mango

49. “If a tie is like kissing your sister, losing is like kissing your grandmother with her teeth out.” - George Brett

50. “I love the smell of the ice... And the cold. The sound the puck makes when it's sliding across the ice or when hits the net for a goal... as long as it's our goal. I love the sound of sticks crashing against one another. The sound my skates make when I come to a hard stop. The roar of the crowd. The way I feel when i'm playing. I can do things on this ice that I can't do anywhere else.” - J. Sterling

51. “The attraction of snowboarding is the freedom it gives you. With a snowboard on your feet the sky is the limit. You can do anything and go anywhere. This is not just for pro riders. It is for everyone.The other amazing thing with snowboarding is how easy it is to get away from people and enjoy the solitude of the mountains. Its almost impossible in surfing but with snowboarding it is a short hike from the top of the lift or the side of the road.” - Jeremy Jones

52. “He speaks in that strange sports talk, telling me about the start of the new season and asks if I follow baseball. No. I really don’t. He assures me if I stay in town long enough I will become a baseball fan. It’s a requirement of living in St. Louis. Everyone is a Cardinal’s fan. “Loyal,” he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.” - Gwenn Wright

53. “I've never questioned the integrity of an umpire. Their eyesight, yes.” - Leo Durocher

54. “I see great things in baseball.” - Walt Whitman

55. “With a hint of good judgment, to fear nothing, not failure or suffering or even death, indicates that you value life the most. You live to the extreme; you push limits; you spend your time building legacies. Those do not die.” - Criss Jami

56. “Philippine culture was clearly different. It wasn't the fan's duty to remain aloof in the presence of stars; it was the player's responsibility to show gratitude to the average Filipino.” - Rafe Bartholomew

57. “...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.” - Chuck Klosterman

58. “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” - Phil Jackson

59. “Love is a violent recreational sport. Proceed at your own risk. Helmets, armor, and steel-toe boots are required by law.” - H.C.Paye

60. “I've fallen in love with baseball.” - Nick Jonas

61. “In sport the mind serves as the acolyte and apprentice of the body. Nothing interferes with the flow of the game more than the athlete who obsesses about his every move on the court. You move, you react, you recover, you drive, and the thinking is seamless and invisible in the secret codes of your game.” - Pat Conroy

62. “We old athletes carry the disfigurements and markings of contests remembered only by us and no one else. Nothing is more lost than a forgotten game.” - Pat Conroy

63. “[On writing:] "There's a great quote by Julius Irving that went, 'Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.'"(One On 1, interview with Budd Mishkin; NY1, March 25, 2007.)” - David Halberstam

64. “If you have confidence you have patience. Confidence, that is everything.” - Ilie Nastase

65. “You either commit yourself as a professional racing driver that's designed to win races or you come second or you come third or fifth and am not design to come third, fourth or fifth, I race to win.” - Ayrton Senna

66. “Részvétet éreztem az ismeretlen sportember iránt, és egyúttal kárörömet is. Úgy kell neki, miért sportember, de ha már sportember, mit keres minálunk. Valószínűleg ő is így érzett volna irányomban, ha a golfpályán látott volna meg engem.” - Antal Szerb

67. “(Baseball) is a game with a lot of waiting in it; it is a game with increasingly heightened anticipation of increasingly limited action” - John Irving

68. “The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.” - A. Bartlett Giamatti

69. “There's something about sports. You can be setting fire to cats and burying them in your backyard, but as long as you're playing team sports, people think you're okay.” - Polly Horvath

70. “He's probably the only player who doesn't play for 10 months and, if he scores a hat trick in his first game back, no one would be surprised.” - Ryan Whitney

71. “Baseball has so much history and tradition. You can respect it, or you can exploit it for profit, but it's still being made all over the place, all the time.” - Michael Lewis

72. “When I was in high school I asked myself at one point: "Why do I care if my high school's team wins the football game? I don't know anybody on the team, they have nothing to do with me... why am I here and applaud? It does not make any sense." But the point is, it does make sense: It's a way of building up irrational attitudes of submission to authority and group cohesion behind leadership elements. In fact it's training in irrational jingoism. That's also a feature of competitive sports.” - Noam Chomsky

73. “Every sport pretends to be literature. . .” - Alistair Cooke

74. “Look, girls. It is important to all of us that we win this game, right? Well, when it comes to athletics, boys are simply better suited than girls. It’s a fact of nature that no one can change. I’m sorry, but maybe you can play next time when it’s less crucial.” - Francine Pascal

75. “What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?""...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business."Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines."The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.'"Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.” - Owen Johnson

76. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body.” - David Foster Wallace

77. “You see, sex for Jews is not such a terrible sin. It's just one more physical sport we're gonna stink at.” - Jaffe Cohen

78. “I was awarded 'Most Aggressive Rider of the Day', generally given to the most spectacular loser of the day.” - David Millar

79. “If you're not at the front, you're not in the race.” - David Millar

80. “I might have changed, but that did not mean the sport had.” - David Millar

81. “Steve [sports psychiatrist] had already taught me to try and stop worrying so much about pleasing everyone. We knew that this was one of my most draining flaws and he again used three groups to clarify my thinking. There would always be some people, Steve said, who would care about me and love me. In contrast there would also be a select group of people who would never warm to me - no matter what I did. And in the middle came the overwhelming mass who were largely indifferent to any of my failures or triumphs. I needed to understand that most people didn't really care what I did or said. All my anguish about how they might perceive me was redundant. Steve helped me realize that I spent too much time trying to please those oblivious people in the middle or, more problematically, the small group who would never change their critical opinion of me. I should concentrate on the people who really did show concern for me.” - Victoria Pendleton

82. “Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.” - Pat Conroy

83. “Even our recreation was scheduled. There was no time to look for birds or wander into the nearby woods. We were put into teams and sent into violent pursuit of a helpless ball.” - Gloria Whelan

84. “I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that's not pulling the trigger.” - Mia Hamm

85. “Training energy system to effectively resynthesize ATP – as quickly as possible – so that muscle contraction continues without onset of fatigue – forms the basis of most exercise protocols.” - The Fitness Doc

86. “Football is the poetry of a motion.” - Pubudu Lasal Dissanayake

87. “On the surface, there is something peculiar about turning a portion of one's happiness over to a collection of ballplayers, and perhaps more peculiar still is concerning oneself about ball games played decades before one's birth.” - Tom Swift