Top 140 Phil Knight Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people’s hearts.”

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

53. “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

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

— Phil Knight

55. “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

56. “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

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

— Phil Knight

58. “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

59. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

64. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

71. “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

72. “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

73. “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

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

— 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. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

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

— Phil Knight

82. “Like it or not, life is a game.”

— Phil Knight

83. “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

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

— Phil Knight

85. “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

86. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

96. “I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, shorter as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all... different.”

— Phil Knight

97. “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

98. “I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose.”

— Phil Knight

99. “Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America. Today it’s all but extinct.”

— Phil Knight

100. “He thought. And thought. “I was,” he said, “a professor of the jungle.”

— Phil Knight