Basketball Quotes

I tried to teach them [his sons] that about the importance of self-discipline, and that the culture of yes is built on a foundation of no.

Bill Walton

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

To be a professional you have to act like one as well..

Alcurtis Turner

The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player's mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

David Foster Wallace

Basketball is not just a game its a way of living if you apply it to everyday life.

Alcurtis Turner

And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.

Robert Montgomery Knight

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

My swag was phenomenal.

Gilbert Arenas

[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 t

David Halberstam

They say that nobody is perfect. Then they tell you practice makes perfect. I wish they'd make up their minds.

Wilt Chamberlain

ESPN, is having the ability to foretell future outcomes in sports.

Anthony Liccione

Bradley is one of the few basketball players who have ever been appreciatively cheered by a disinterested away-from-home crowd while warming up. This curious event occurred last March, just before Princeton eliminated the Virginia Military Institute, the year's Southern Conference champion, from the NCAA championships. The game was played in Philadelphia and was the last of a tripleheader. The people there were worn out, because most of them were emotionally committed to either Villanova or Temple-two local teams that had just been involved in enervating battles with Providence and Connecticut, respectively, scrambling for a chance at the rest of the country. A group of Princeton players shooting basketballs miscellaneously in preparation for still another game hardly promised to be a high point of the evening, but Bradley, whose routine in the warmup time is a gradual crescendo of activity, is more interesting to watch before a game than most players are in play. In Philadelphia that night, what he did was, for him, anything but unusual. As he does before all games, he began by shooting set shots close to the basket, gradually moving back until he was shooting long sets from 20 feet out, and nearly all of them dropped into the net with an almost mechanical rhythm of accuracy. Then he began a series of expandingly difficult jump shots, and one jumper after another went cleanly through the basket with so few exceptions that the crowd began to murmur. Then he started to perform whirling reverse moves before another cadence of almost steadily accurate jump shots, and the murmur increased. Then he began to sweep hook shots into the air. He moved in a semicircle around the court. First with his right hand, then with his left, he tried seven of these long, graceful shots-the most difficult ones in the orthodoxy of basketball-and ambidextrously made them all. The game had not even begun, but the presumably unimpressible Philadelphians were applauding like an audience at an opera.

John McPhee

If basketball was going to enable Bradley to make friends, to prove that a banker's son is as good as the next fellow, to prove that he could do without being the greatest-end-ever at Missouri, to prove that he was not chicken, and to live up to his mother's championship standards, and if he was going to have some moments left over to savor his delight in the game, he obviously needed considerable practice, so he borrowed keys to the gym and set a schedule for himself that he adhereded to for four full years—in the school year, three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day.

John McPhee

To be successful you have to be selfish, or else you never achieve. And once you get to your highest level, then you have to be unselfish. Stay reachable. Stay in touch. Don't isolate.

Michael Jordan

You know how when you step on court your coach is like "go go go!"? And all throughout you just keep telling yourself to hit harder and harder and keep at it? You know how much you treasure those five-minute timeouts? You know how good you feel at the end of a session? You know how you're glad you're tired? No pills, no shots, just plain energy. I want to work like that. Whether I have to write ten thousand words or send five hundred emails, brainstorm for hours at a time, I want to have that energy. To keep fighting. To know it's all worth it. Oh, yeah. That's my perfect day.

Thisuri Wanniarachchi

Practice hard,Train hard,work hard and Play harder.

Alcurtis Turner

Toward the end of Carmel's life, the perception of super talls shifted dramatically, thanks largely to televised NBA games, By 1975, pretty much everyone had seen super tall people on TV, in the context of being celebrated in front of sold-out basketball arenas. This new frame of reference could not have been more positive. By 1995 Shaquille O'Neal was known as The Man of Steel, not the Traveling Human Giant. The idea of super tall people as freaks was replaced by the idea of super tall people as amazing athletes.

Arianne Cohen

In middle school I played against you once. And lost. I was so frustrated that I continued practicing even after I retired... And then when I entered high school, hell yeah, I laughed. The guy I vowed to defeat no matter what was standing right in front of me as one of my own teammates. But now it's pointless to hold a grudge. Rather, I wanted to make you recognize me. (Takao Kazunari)

Tadatoshi Fujimaki

His ability to evoke Celtic pride was incredible. He would always talk about how all the old players called him up after an embarrasing performance and wanted to disassociate themselves from the Celtics. They wanted to mail in their championship rings, wanted their numbers removed from the rafters, and by this point there would be tears rolling down our cheeks and we'd want to kill.

Bill Walton

Who could better motivate Bill Russell than Bill Russell?

Red Auerbach

Get the big picture! See 2 Believe!

Leon Welch

The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.

Criss Jami

The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.

Phil Jackson

We'd taken up our positions on the benches between the school hall and a newly-installed outdoor basketball court. Being hip-hoppers, we were obliged to be obsessed with basketball. None of us had a ball.

Nikesh Shukla

Champions never sleep, the eternal spirit keep them alert and awake.

Amit Ray

It is not over. Champions extend their limits and make things happen.

Amit Ray

The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not

Charles Barkley

Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.

Sherman Alexie

You need to be more careful, or you could hurt yourself."Right. Thank you, Mrs. Detweiler. I never would have come to that conclusion by myself. I was planning on incorporating a backflip into my next walk across the classroom but on second thought...

Janette Rallison

Your limits are somewhere up there, waiting for you to reach beyond infinity.

Arnold Henry

[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.'", March 25, 2007.)

David Halberstam

In any game, the game itself is the prize, no matter who wins, ultimately both lose the game.

Amit Kalantri

We learn to make a shell for ourselves when we are young and then spend the rest of our lives hoping for someone to reach inside and touch us. Just touch us—anything more than that would be too much for us to bear.

Bill Russell

Everyone has the fire, but the champions know when to ignite the spark.

Amit Ray

Basketball Quotes

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