Top 140 Phil Knight Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Make history or be a part of it.”

— Phil Knight

2. “Play by the rules, but be ferocious.”

— Phil Knight

3. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way – that leaves us.”

— Phil Knight

Featured in: Hustle Quotes, Boldness Quotes, Competition Quotes

4. “Dream audaciously. Have the courage to fail forward. Act with urgency.”

— Phil Knight

Featured in: Hustle Quotes, Dreaming Big Quotes, Boldness Quotes

5. “Life is growth. You grow or you die.”

— Phil Knight

6. “The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.”

— Phil Knight

7. “Dare to take chances, lest you leave your talent buried in the ground.”

— Phil Knight

8. “It’s alright to be Goliath but always act like David.”

— Phil Knight

9. “A brand is something that has a clear-cut identity among consumers, which a company creates by sending out a clear, consistent message over a period of years until it achieves a critical mass of marketing.”

— Phil Knight

10. “Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool.”

— Phil Knight

11. “There is an immutable conflict at work in life and in business, a constant battle between peace and chaos. Neither can be mastered, but both can be influenced. How you go about that is the key to success.”

— Phil Knight

12. “The trouble in America is not that we are making too many mistakes, but that we are making too few.”

— Phil Knight

13. “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. – Shunryu.”

— Phil Knight

14. “When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.”

— Phil Knight

15. “Perception can be changed.”

— Phil Knight

16. “I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.”

— Phil Knight

17. “It is possible to tell a customer “no”, and have the customer thank you for doing it.”

— Phil Knight

18. “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”

— Phil Knight

19. “Whatever comes, just don’t stop. That’s.”

— Phil Knight

20. “We used to think that everything started in the lab. Now we realize that everything spins off the consumer.”

— Phil Knight

21. “I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.”

— Phil Knight

22. “You can’t explain much in 60 seconds, but when you show Michael Jordan, you don’t have to. It’s that simple.”

— Phil Knight

23. “Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track.”

— Phil Knight

24. “I’m Phil Knight, and I don’t believe in advertising.”

— Phil Knight

25. “I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.”

— Phil Knight

26. “Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree. I.”

— Phil Knight

27. “Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.”

— Phil Knight

28. “No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room,” he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there,” said Stahr. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.”

— Phil Knight

29. “Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Of.”

— Phil Knight

30. “People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible. Sometimes.”

— Phil Knight

31. “And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.”

— Phil Knight

32. “I trusted them, wholly, and didn’t look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn’t have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me.”

— Phil Knight

33. “But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.”

— Phil Knight

34. “But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”

— Phil Knight

35. “When it came rolling in, the money affected us all. Not much, and not for long, because none of us was ever driven by money. But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.”

— Phil Knight

36. “I don’t consider myself enigmatic, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my public persona.”

— Phil Knight

37. “My job is to listen to ideas, maybe cook up a few of my own, and make decisions based on what’s good for the shareholders and for the company.”

— Phil Knight

38. “How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?”

— Phil Knight

39. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought. Signs.”

— Phil Knight

40. “I felt that same sense of betrayal when Nike came under attack for conditions in our overseas factories – the so-called sweatshop controversy. Whenever reporters said a factory was unsatisfactory, they never said how much better it was than the day we first went in.”

— Phil Knight

41. “Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most. Long.”

— Phil Knight

42. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

— Phil Knight

43. “There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up.”

— Phil Knight

44. “Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are really part of a very big advertising program, and the fact that they make so much money is because the markets have dictated that they get that money, and the fact that they endorse our products allows us to sell more products and create more jobs.”

— Phil Knight

45. “If my life was to be all work no play, I wanted my work to be play.”

— Phil Knight

46. “Sports is like rock ‘n’ roll. Both are dominant cultural forces, both speak an international language, and both are all about emotions.”

— Phil Knight

47. “For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s.”

— Phil Knight

48. “You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break. I.”

— Phil Knight

49. “Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart. In.”

— Phil Knight

50. “It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”

— Phil Knight