Knute Rockne Quotes

Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

The essence of football was blocking, tackling, and execution based on timing, rhythm and deception.

Win one for the Gipper.

One man practicing sportsmanship is far better than a hundred teaching it.

There is no need for me continuing unless I'm able to improve.

The best thing I ever learned in life was that things have to be worked for. A lot of people seem to think there is some sort of magic in making a winning football team. There isn't, but there's plenty of work.

We count on winning. And if we lose, don't beef. And the best way to prevent beefing is - don't lose.

I've found that prayers work best when you have big players.

The morning we left South Bend, every student and professor was out of bed long before breakfast and marched downtown accompanying the team to the railroad station. It was the first time I'd seen anything like this mass hysteria generated on the Notre Dame campus over a football game.

Leaders are like eagles ... they don't flock. You'll find them one at a time.

Four years of football are calculated to breed in the average man more of the ingredients of success in life than almost any academic course he takes.
-Knute Rockne

Courage means being afraid to do something, but still doing it.

You know, I've been attending so many banquets that I know what they're going to serve before I get there.

Now I'm going to tell you something I've kept to myself for years. None of you ever knew George Gipp. He was long before your time, but you all know what a tradition he is at Notre Dame. And the last thing he said to me, "Rock," he said, "sometime when the team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they've got and win just one for the Gipper. I don't know where I'll be then, Rock," he said, "but I'll know about it and I'll be happy."

If the coach insists upon hard play, but clean play, the team will do likewise.

At home we're the hosts, and I never liked the idea of being embarrased in front of our friends.

When you were riding on the crest of a wave, youwere most likely to be missing out on something.

I'm getting sick and tired of doing anything half-way.

Play like you're positive on the victory, even though they're leading big now.

No star playing, just football.

Show me a gracious loser and I'll show you a failure.

Winning to often is as disastrous as losing too often. Both get the same results, the falling off of the public's enthusiasm.

I don't like to lose, and that isn't so much because it is just a football game, but because defeat means the failure to reach your objective. I don't want a football player who doesn't take defeat to heart, who laughs it off with the thought, "Oh, well, there's another Saturday." The trouble in American life today, in business as well as in sports, is that too many people are afraid of competition. The result is that in some circles people have come to sneer at success if it costs hard work and training and sacrifice.

The only qualifications for a lineman are to be big and dumb. To be a back, you only have to be dumb.

I enjoy talking to my football men and my chemistry classes and I feel sure that they are quite interested in what I have to say.

Win or lose, do it fairly.

If we're a hit, let 'em say anything they want.