Top 80 Phil Jackson Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Basketball is a sport that involves the subtle interweaving of players at full speed to the point where they are thinking and moving as one.”

— Phil Jackson

52. “The way you do anything is the way you do everything. TOM WAITS.”

— Phil Jackson

53. “Management guru Stephen Covey tells this old Japanese tale about a samurai warrior and his three sons: The samurai wanted to teach his sons about the power of teamwork. So he gave each of them an arrow and asked them to break it. No problem. Each son did it easily. Then the samurai gave them a bundle of three arrows bound together and asked them to repeat the process. But none of them could. “That’s your lesson,” the samurai said. “If you three stick together, you will never be defeated.”

— Phil Jackson

54. “Everybody has an opportunity to play a role, a playmaking role, so it makes it harder to coach. It takes a little more time.”

— Phil Jackson

55. “What moves me is watching young men bond together and tap into the magic that arises when they focus with their whole heart and soul on something greater than themselves. Once you’ve experienced that, it’s something you never forget.”

— Phil Jackson

56. “I’m not trying to find answers anymore. I’m trying to live what I know.”

— Phil Jackson

57. “Basketball, unlike football with its prescribed routes, is an improvisational game, similar to jazz. If someone drops a note, someone else must step into the vacuum and drive the beat that sustains the team.”

— Phil Jackson

58. “As a leader your job is to do everything in your power to create the perfect conditions for success by benching your ego and inspiring your team to play the game the right way. But at some point, you need to let go and turn yourself over to the basketball gods. The soul of success is surrendering to what is.”

— Phil Jackson

59. “I will have Derek Fisher wear all 5 of his rings the first time he comes in to talk to Carmelo.”

— Phil Jackson

60. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are. JOSEPH CAMPBELL.”

— Phil Jackson

61. “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned. THE BUDDHA.”

— Phil Jackson

62. “I’m not going to coach again. I’ve done my coaching, and I think I can put that aside.”

— Phil Jackson

63. “Pau is one of the best big men in the game. I mean, Pau Gasol is going to be in the Hall of Fame.”

— Phil Jackson

64. “He practiced against Kobe all of last year, so obviously it was sweet revenge for him. We deserved that. We didn’t know who he was, we gave him up to Charlotte, we had no idea how good a player he was.”

— Phil Jackson

65. “Albert Einstein once described his rules of work: “One: Out of clutter, find simplicity. Two: From discord, find harmony. Three: In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

— Phil Jackson

66. “An acrobatic dunk will make it onto Sports Center. A simple, unspectacular bounce pass in the rhythm of the offense will not. System basketball has been replaced by players who want to be the system.”

— Phil Jackson

67. “Think lightly of yourself and think deeply of the world. MIYAMOTO MUSASHI.”

— Phil Jackson

68. “For us tall people, the whole key is that your hips and your knees should form a right angle when you sit down. That’s where backs and hips get to be problems for big guys.”

— Phil Jackson

69. “To inspire the players, I adapted a quote from Walt Whitman and taped it on their lockers before the first game of the playoffs, against the Miami Heat. “Henceforth we seek not good fortune, we are ourselves good fortune”.”

— Phil Jackson

70. “The master nodded. “To hear the unheard,” he said, “is a necessary discipline to be a good ruler. For only when a ruler has learned to listen closely to the people’s hearts, hearing their feelings uncommunicated, pains unexpressed, and complaints not spoken of, can he hope to inspire confidence in the people, understand when something is wrong, and meet the true needs of his citizens.”

— Phil Jackson

71. “I think the most rewarding part of the job, and I think most coaches would say it, is practice. If you have it, a very good practice in which you have 12 guys participate, and they can really get something out of it, lose themselves in practice.”

— Phil Jackson

72. “The problem with trading dominant players of that size is you never get in return what you’ve bargained away.”

— Phil Jackson

73. “Suzuki had just finished giving a talk to a group of Zen students when someone in the audience said, “You’ve been talking about Buddhism for nearly an hour, and I haven’t been able to understand a thing you said. Could you say one thing about Buddhism I can understand?” After the laughter died down, Suzuki replied calmly, “Everything changes.”

— Phil Jackson

74. “I played hockey in North Dakota growing up and watch a lot of that.”

— Phil Jackson

75. “When we called time-out with twenty-five seconds to go,” he re-called, “we went into the huddle and Phil said, ‘Michael, I want you to take the last shot,’ and Michael said, ‘You know, Phil, I don’t feel comfortable in these situations. So maybe we ought to go in another direction.’ Then Scottie said, ‘You know, Phil, Michael said in his commercial that he’s been asked to do this twenty-six times and he’s failed. So why don’t we go to Steve.”

— Phil Jackson

76. “If children are fated to live out the unfulfilled dreams of their parents.”

— Phil Jackson

77. “But trying to eliminate anger never works. The more you try to suppress it, the more likely it is to erupt later in a more virulent form. A better approach is to become as intimate as possible with how anger works on your mind and body so that you can transform its underlying energy into something productive.”

— Phil Jackson

78. “I’m a sports-watcher. I played football and baseball, coached baseball. So I watch those things.”

— Phil Jackson

79. “I think people forgot that there are still ways you can get the ball inside rather than just standing there and throwing the ball in. You have to have a system that makes all things work.”

— Phil Jackson

80. “Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects.”

— Phil Jackson

81. “Those words, Suzuki said, contain the basic truth of existence: Everything is always in flux. Until you accept this, you won’t be able to find true equanimity. But to do that means accepting life as it is, not just what you consider the “good parts.”

— Phil Jackson

82. “In a nutshell, the Buddha taught that life is suffering and that the primary cause of our suffering is our desire for things to be different from the way they actually are. One moment, things may be going our way, and in the next moment they’re not. When we try to prolong pleasure or reject pain, we suffer.”

— Phil Jackson

83. “The Dalai Lama calls it “the enemy’s gift.” From a Buddhist perspective, battling with enemies can help you develop greater compassion for and tolerance of others. “In order to practice sincerely and to develop patience,” he says, “you need someone who willfully hurts you. Thus, these people give us real opportunities to practice these things. They are testing our inner strength in a way that even our guru cannot.”

— Phil Jackson

84. “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing,” writes Chodron. “We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”

— Phil Jackson

85. “So George talked about the two aspects of every crisis: danger and opportunity. If you have the right mind-set, he said, you can make the crisis work for you. You have the chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before.”

— Phil Jackson

86. “Martin Luther King Jr. spoke eloquently about this phenomenon. “In a real sense, all of life is interrelated,” he said. “All persons are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”

— Phil Jackson

87. “Michael needed to shift his perspective on leadership. “It’s all about being present and taking responsibility for how you relate to yourself and others,” says George. “And that means being willing to adjust so that you can meet people where they are. Instead of expecting them to be somewhere else and getting angry and trying to will them to that place, you try to meet them where they are and lead them where you want them to go.”

— Phil Jackson

88. “The book I selected for him was Corelli’s Mandolin, a novel set on a small Greek island occupied by the Italian army during World War II. During the course of the story, the islanders have to accept the fact that they no longer control their own destiny and must come together and adapt to the new reality. In the end, they win by losing.”

— Phil Jackson

89. “The Lakotas’ concept of teamwork was deeply rooted in their view of the universe. A warrior didn’t try to stand out from his fellow band members; he strove to act bravely and honorably, to help the group in whatever way he could to accomplish its mission.”

— Phil Jackson