Top 140 Phil Knight Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Phil Knight

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

— Phil Knight

105. “In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity – respectability. Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream.”

— Phil Knight

106. “Meeting sports athletes that are the best in the world is a thrill to this day.”

— Phil Knight

107. “When I first left Oregon I was most excited about two things on my itinerary. I wanted to pitch the Japanese my Crazy Idea. And I wanted to stand before the Acropolis.”

— Phil Knight

108. “Up until the time I was 14 years old, I was sure that I was going to be a big-league baseball player. But that dream came to a rude awakening when I got cut from my high school baseball team.”

— Phil Knight

109. “There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. At.”

— Phil Knight

110. “History is one long processional of crazy ideas.”

— Phil Knight

111. “I went to Cairo, to the Giza plateau, and stood beside desert nomads and their silk-draped camels at the foot of the Great Sphinx, all of us squinting up into its eternally open eyes. The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.”

— Phil Knight

112. “He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to-equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.”

— Phil Knight

113. “The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. Too.”

— Phil Knight

114. “We also gave him a business card that said National Director of Public Affairs. People often narrowed their eyes and asked me what that meant. I narrowed my eyes right back. “It means he can run fast,” I said.”

— Phil Knight

115. “For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.”

— Phil Knight

116. “As for workout clothes, Bowerman told readers that proper clothing “may help the spirit,” but added that people shouldn’t get hung up on brands. Maybe.”

— Phil Knight

117. “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.”

— Phil Knight

118. “Somehow, in meeting after meeting, I held my tongue. Everything my banker said, I ultimately accepted. Then I’d do exactly as I pleased.”

— Phil Knight

119. “It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.”

— Phil Knight

120. “He’s one of the best storytellers in the history of Nike. My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust?”

— Phil Knight

121. “Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation.”

— Phil Knight

122. “No one heard. No one cared. They cared only about the bottom line. Not even the bottom line, but their bottom line. I.”

— Phil Knight

123. “Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it – that was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth.”

— Phil Knight

124. “It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it – this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.”

— Phil Knight

125. “I was crazed with loneliness, cut off from everything and everyone I knew. The occasional sight of a New York Times, or a Time magazine, gave me a lump in my throat.”

— Phil Knight

126. “You haven’t lived until you’ve competed against the fastest runners in the world wearing shoes made of cod.”

— Phil Knight

127. “Johnson phoned first thing this morning,” he said. “Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night.” I rolled my eyes. “A dream?” “He’s serious,” Woodell said. “He’s always serious.” “He says he sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him,” Woodell said. “What is it?” I asked, bracing myself. “Nike.” “Huh?” “Nike.” “Spell it.” “N-I-K-E,” Woodell said. I wrote it on a yellow legal pad. The Greek goddess of victory. The Acropolis.”

— Phil Knight

128. “I tell them about the untapped resources, natural and human, that the world has at its disposal, the abundant ways and means to solve its many crises. All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle. I.”

— Phil Knight

129. “In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list.”

— Phil Knight

130. “If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents. My.”

— Phil Knight

131. “I was fascinated by all the great generals, from Alexander the Great to George Patton. I hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit.”

— Phil Knight

132. “As ever, the accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.”

— Phil Knight

133. “I feel in my heart this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive.”

— Phil Knight

134. “And we were nearly all merciless self-loathers, which kept the egos in check. There was none of that smartest-guy-in-the-room foolishness. Hayes, Strasser, Woodell, Johnson, each would have been the smartest guy in any room, but none believed it of himself, or the next guy.”

— Phil Knight

135. “He was waiting for me to bend, to up my offer, but for once in my life I had leverage, because I had nothing left to give. “Take it or leave it” is like four of a kind. Hard to beat.”

— Phil Knight

136. “By then Prefontaine was universally known as Pre, and he was far more than a phenom; he was an outright superstar. He was the biggest thing to hit the world of American track and field since Jesse Owens. Sportswriters frequently compared him to James Dean, and Mick Jagger, and Runner’s World said the most apt comparison might be Muhammad Ali. He was that kind of swaggery, transformative figure.”

— Phil Knight

137. “I’d always suspected, the essence of beauty or truth, or all we ever need to know of either, lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided.”

— Phil Knight

138. “When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything.”

— Phil Knight

139. “The East Coast was running smoothly, but it now involved too much administration for him. The whole thing needed reorganizing, streamlining, and that wasn’t the best use of Johnson’s time or creativity.”

— Phil Knight

140. “In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude.”

— Phil Knight

141. “I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6.”

— Phil Knight

142. “But I was wrong. His parents had a little bit more, and they asked if I needed that, too. And I said yes. And they gave me their last three thousand dollars, draining their savings down to zero. How I wished I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. On my way out the door I stopped. I asked them: “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” Woodell’s mother said, “if you can’t trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?”

— Phil Knight

143. “I was following a path that felt like my path, and though I wasn’t sure where it would lead, I was ready to find out.”

— Phil Knight

144. “I didn’t consider myself an optimist by nature. Not that I was a pessimist. I generally tried to hover between the two, committing to neither.”

— Phil Knight