Top 40 Knute Rockne Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.”

— Knute Rockne

2. “All the world loves a winner and has no time for a loser.”

— Knute Rockne

3. “Win or lose, do it fairly.”

— Knute Rockne

4. “One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.”

— Knute Rockne

5. “The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.”

— Knute Rockne

6. “The secret of winning is working more as a team, less as individuals.”

— Knute Rockne

7. “Make the present good, and the past will take care of itself.”

— Knute Rockne

8. “Let’s win one for the Gipper.”

— Knute Rockne

9. “Show me a gracious loser and I’ll show you a failure.”

— Knute Rockne

10. “There is not economy in getting cheap service or equipment. Buy the best and cry only once.”

— Knute Rockne

11. “Courage means being afraid to do something, but still doing it.”

— Knute Rockne

12. “Drink the first. Sip the second slowly. Skip the third.”

— Knute Rockne

13. “I don’t like to lose, and that isn’t so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective.”

— Knute Rockne

14. “Winning to often is as disastrous as losing too often. Both get the same results, the falling off of the public’s enthusiasm.”

— Knute Rockne

15. “The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for. A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn’t, but there’s plenty of work.”

— Knute Rockne

16. “One loss is good for the soul, Too many losses is not good for the coach.”

— Knute Rockne

17. “We can all be geniuses because one definition of genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.”

— Knute Rockne

18. “When you were riding on the crest of a wave, youwere most likely to be missing out on something.”

— Knute Rockne

19. “The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception.”

— Knute Rockne

20. “The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I’d seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.”

— Knute Rockne

21. “Play like you’re positive on the victory, even though they’re leading big now.”

— Knute Rockne

22. “It isn’t necessary to see a good tackle. You can hear it.”

— Knute Rockne

23. “The only qualifications for a lineman are to be big and dumb. To be a back, you only have to be dumb.”

— Knute Rockne

24. “An automobile goes nowhere efficiently unless it has a quick, hot spark to ignite things, to set the cogs of the machine in motion. So I try to make every player on my team feel he’s the spark keeping our machine in motion.”

— Knute Rockne

25. “You know, I’ve been attending so many banquets that I know what they’re going to serve before I get there.”

— Knute Rockne

26. “At home we’re the hosts, and I never liked the idea of being embarrassed in front of our friends.”

— Knute Rockne

27. “Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.”

— Knute Rockne

28. “I’ve found that prayers work best when you have big players.”

— Knute Rockne

29. “Generalities don’t count and won’t help you in football.”

— Knute Rockne

30. “Boards, boards, boards.”

— Knute Rockne

31. “Yes, I know that you feel you are not strong enough. That’s what the enemy thinks, too. But we’re gonna fool them.”

— Knute Rockne

32. “On the road we’re somebody else’s guests – and we play in a way that they’re not going to forget we visited them.”

— Knute Rockne

33. “If the coach insists upon hard play, but clean play, the team will do likewise.”

— Knute Rockne

34. “A coach’s greatest asset is his sense of responsibility – the reliance placed on him by his players.”

— Knute Rockne

35. “Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes.”

— Knute Rockne

36. “No star playing, just football.”

— Knute Rockne

37. “There is no need for me continuing unless I’m able to improve.”

— Knute Rockne

38. “If we’re a hit, let ’em say anything they want.”

— Knute Rockne

39. “I’m getting sick and tired of doing anything half-way.”

— Knute Rockne

40. “If I flop, let ’em pan me.”

— Knute Rockne

41. “We count on winning. And if we lose, don’t beef. And the best way to prevent beefing is – don’t lose.”

— Knute Rockne

42. “I enjoy talking to my football men and my chemistry classes and I feel sure that they are quite interested in what I have to say.”

— Knute Rockne

43. “Never tell ’em how many lettermen you’ve got coming back. Tell ’em how many you lost.”

— Knute Rockne