Phil Knight Quotes

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

the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it,

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.

You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.

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.

Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play,

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

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

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, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

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 hated war, but I loved the warrior spirit. I hated the sword, but loved the samurai.

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

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

No matter the sport-no matter the human endeavor, really-total effort will win people's hearts

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.