Phil Knight Quotes

(Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.)

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.

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.

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

The basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.

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. WE

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Because mothers are our first coaches.

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.

"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."

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