Top 140 Phil Knight Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It doesn’t matter how many people you offend, as long as you’re getting your message to your consumers. I say to those people who do not want to offend anybody: You are going to have a very, very difficult time having meaningful advertising.”

— Phil Knight

52. “I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.”

— Phil Knight

53. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people’s hearts.”

— Phil Knight

54. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa. Oneness – in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”

— Phil Knight

55. “Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome.”

— Phil Knight

56. “Any building is a temple if you make it so.”

— Phil Knight

57. “Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. And.”

— Phil Knight

58. “We wanted Nike to be the world’s best sports and fitness company. Once you say that, you have a focus. You don’t end up making wing tips or sponsoring the next Rolling Stones world tour.”

— Phil Knight

59. “Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that.”

— Phil Knight

60. “I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my green running shoes. Then slipped quietly out the back door. I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the.”

— Phil Knight

61. “Like it or not, life is a game.”

— Phil Knight

62. “Why is it always so hard to get started?”

— Phil Knight

63. “I tell the man Blue Ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a berth in first class.”

— Phil Knight

64. “Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.”

— Phil Knight

65. “I got into the habit every night of phoning my father from my recliner. He’d always be in his recliner, too, and together, recliner to recliner, we’d hash out the latest threat confronting Blue Ribbon.”

— Phil Knight

66. “Business is no more about making money than the human body is about making blood. Yes you need to make the stuff, but only to serve your higher aims.”

— Phil Knight

67. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company.”

— Phil Knight

68. “Pre was most famous for saying, “Somebody may beat me – but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.”

— Phil Knight

69. “I still get real nervous when I go in front of more than two people.”

— Phil Knight

70. “This database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all his customers, at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards. He sent them birthday cards. He sent them notes of congratulation after they completed a big race or marathon.”

— Phil Knight

71. “The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.”

— Phil Knight

72. “All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen, All is dust, says the desert.”

— Phil Knight

73. “Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: 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.”

— Phil Knight

74. “Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.”

— Phil Knight

75. “The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

— Phil Knight

76. “Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. No that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”

— Phil Knight

77. “I told her that I flat-out didn’t want to work for someone else. 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

78. “I don’t know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play, set in the Temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift – a pair of new shoes. I don’t know when I figured out that the play was called Knights.”

— Phil Knight

79. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I.”

— Phil Knight

80. “To study the self is to forget the self. Mi casa, su casa.”

— Phil Knight

81. “Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks – marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling – seem like sure things. 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

82. “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

83. “What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.”

— Phil Knight

84. “If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d.”

— Phil Knight

85. “I do not like stupidity,” he said. “People pay too much attention to numbers.”

— Phil Knight

86. “When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about. Walking.”

— Phil Knight

87. “People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition.”

— Phil Knight

88. “When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some service or product to the lives of strangers and make them happier or healthier or safer or better and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly – the way everything should be done but seldom is, you are participating more fully in the whole vast human drama. More than simply alive, you are helping others to live more fully and if that’s business then alright – call me a businessman.”

— Phil Knight

89. “Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.”

— Phil Knight

90. “Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete.”

— Phil Knight

91. “I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.”

— Phil Knight

92. “We spent a few minutes catching up. I told Bowerman about my trip around the world. Kobe, Jordan, the Temple of Nike.”

— Phil Knight

93. “Because mothers are our first coaches.”

— Phil Knight

94. “I read in my guidebook that Michelangelo was miserable while painting his masterpiece. His back and neck ached. Paint fell constantly into his hair and eyes. He couldn’t wait to be finished, he told friends. If even Michelangelo didn’t like his work, I thought, what hope is there for the rest of us?”

— Phil Knight

95. “Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places.”

— Phil Knight

96. “Oneness – in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”

— Phil Knight

97. “I truly believe the American consumer doesn’t want to buy products made under abusive conditions.”

— Phil Knight

98. “We must all be professors of the jungle.”

— Phil Knight

99. “Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.”

— Phil Knight

100. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to – equally important qualities in a friend.”

— Phil Knight