Sports Psychology Quotes

Whatever is going on inside your head has everything to do with how well you end up performing. ~ D.C. Gonzalez

We know that hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death. Life is just a place where we spend time between games. ~ Fred Shero

The most prepared are the most dedicated. ~ Raymond Berry

If you approach Billy Martin right, he's Okay. I avoid him altogether. ~ Ron Guidry

Earl gave me his version of what happened and asked me not to suspend the umpires. ~ Lee MacPhail

Maybe one of the qualities of being a great coach is being [a jerk]. There are quite a few of them around. ~ Larry Robinson

Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is willing to prepare to win. ~ Bobby Knight

A baseball manager is a necessary evil. ~ Sparky Anderson

Think and then act. Never act and then alibi. ~ Henry Iba

The coaching profession doesn't hand you any gifts. ~ Randy Carlyle

To win takes a complete commitment of mind and body. When you can't make that commitment, they don't call you a champion anymore. ~ Rocky Marciano

I expect big things from myself but as long as I can keep the commitment and dedication and put the hard work in, I don't see why there's any reason not to handle it OK. ~ Rory McIlroy

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous. Though the land be good, You cannot have an abundant crop without cultivation. ~ Plato

Culture. [...] That most people don't do what we tell them to do. They do what they can get away with. ~ Fredrik Backman

There should be a new way to record standings in this league; one column for wins, one for losses and one for gifts. ~ Gene Mauch

The rush lifts him up, his endorphins are bubbling, and afterward he will remember thinking: "How can anyone possibly experience this without thinking he's a god? ~ Fredrik Backman

Letting him manage in the major leagues is like sending Bo Derek through cellblock A without a bodyguard. ~ Bill James

They can't fire me because my family buys too many tickets. ~ LaVell Edwards

Are you saying that the assistant had the answers all along, he just wasn't telling anyone? ~ Jim Valvano

My best game plan is to sit on the bench and call out specific instructions like 'C'mon Boog,' 'Get a hold of one, Frank,' or 'Let's go, Brooks.' ~ Earl Weaver

Finish last in your league and they call you idiot. Finish last in medical school and they call you doctor. ~ Abe Lemons

Men, I want you just thinking of one word all season. One word and one word only: Super Bowl. ~ Bill Peterson

I'm not really interested in sports psychology. It makes me feel like a crazy person. ~ Michelle Wie

The worst thing of having power over other people's lives is that you sometimes get things wrong. ~ Fredrik Backman

The smaller the detail the greater the value. ~ Doug Johnson

The superior man blames himself. The inferior man blames others. ~ Don Shula

I don't care what the tape says. I didn't say it. ~ Ray Malavasi

I've had moments where I didn't hit the ball very good coming in, and you've got to turn it around. That's the whole idea of practicing and really working on being focused on what I'm doing and being committed to what I'm doing. I know what the fix is and I've proven it to myself, and it's just a matter of going out there and executing it consistently over 72 holes. ~ Tiger Woods

Always have a plan and believe in it. I tell my coaches not to compromise. Nothing good happens by accident. ~ Chuck Knox

This is a hump you have to get over, and it usually comes in the first series. You get over the hump and you're on a roll. ~ Al Arbour

Refined indifference is a sports psychology precept: train like there's no tomorrow and then accept whatever happens. Once you step on the field realize that whatever is meant to be is meant to be. ~ Scott Hamilton

Here's a good rule of thumb; too clever is dumb. ~ Ogden Nash

The mind is absolutely instrumental in achieving results, even for athletes. Sports psychology is a very small part, but it's extremely important when you're winning and losing races by hundredths and even thousandths of a second. ~ Michael Johnson

Breathe out unwanted thoughts with your exhale and re-focus your attention directly on what is important right now, at this moment. ~ Amit Ray

I've kind of got an out in cancer. It keeps things in perspective for me. ~ Eric Shanteau

As a manager, you always have a gun to your head. It's a question of whether there is a bullet in the barrel. ~ Kevin Keegan

There's no such thing as luck. Luck is where preparation meets opportunity. ~ Amy Hempel

No matter how far life pushes you down, no matter how much you hurt, you can always bounce back. ~ Sheryl Swoopes

Whenever I decided to release a guy, I always had his room searched first for a gun. You couldn't take any chances with some of them birds. ~ Casey Stengel

There are only two kinds of coaches - those who have been fired, and those who will be fired. ~ Ken Loeffler

Even championship-winning teams don't play well all the time. ~ Teddy Sheringham

Blame is the cowards way out. ~ Elvin Hayes

You just listen to the ball and bat come together. They make an awful noise. ~ Darrell Johnson

Confidence comes from hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication. ~ Roger Staubach

We set the table, but no one ate. ~ Johnny Oates

Nothing is as good as it seems, and nothing is as bad as it seems. Somewhere in between lies realty. ~ Lou Holtz

I don't know any other way to lead but by example. ~ Don Shula

I have no problem with responsible gun owners who own weapons for self-protection, hunting, or just sport. The ones who believe they have a constitutional right to 100-round magazines to fight off I don't know what - a zombie apocalypse? - try to shut down dialogue with threats and other macho posing because of their flawed beliefs. ~ Kurt Eichenwald

Competition is the spice of sports; but if you make spice the whole meal you'll be sick. ~ George Leonard

You have to deal with people the way they are, not the way you'd like them to be. ~ Helen DeWitt

Baseball hasn't forgotten me. I go to a lot of old-timers games and I haven't lost a thing. I sit in the bullpen and let people throw things at me. Just like old times. ~ Bob Uecker

I'm sick of the media making female sports athletes into supermodels, when they're clearly sixes at best. ~ Daniel Tosh

If people lived forever - if they never got any older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way were doing now? I mean, we think about its everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such t
hing as death, the complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. ~ Haruki Murakami

The amount of evidence and its quality do not count for much, because poor evidence can make a very good story. For some of our most important beliefs we have no evidence at all, except that people we love and trust hold these beliefs. Considering how little we know, the confidence we have in our beliefs is preposterous - and it is also essential. ~ Daniel Kahneman

Every time I see a guy walk out of an over-the-top sports car, I think they need a cold shower. ~ Gia Allemand

In 1982 when I showed up, the average age of the drivers in the series was something like 40, 41. The crowds were small. There was not much prize money. The competition wasn't very tight. ~ Bobby Rahal

There are a lot of eating disorders in our sport, so I try very hard not to get consumed by all that. ~ Laura Wilkinson

Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity's inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate in our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this most important topic before this virulent madness destroys us. ~ Paul Levy

I familiarize myself with every detail of their crimes and loathe what they did. At the same time, I may feel tremendous empathy and sorrow for what they went through in their young lives that contributed to their adult behavior ~ John E. Douglas

When I took Psychology 101, the professor taught us about random reinforcement. Put three
groups of rats in three separate cages, each equipped with a bar. The first group of rats got a
pellet every time they pressed the bar. The second group never got pellets, no matter how often
they pressed. And the third group got pellets just once in a while.
The first group, the professor said,
eventually gets bored with the guaranteed reward and the rats who never get treats give up, too.
But the random rats will press on that bar forever, hoping each time they press that this time the magic will happen,
that this time they'll get lucky. It was at that moment in class that I realized that I had become my father's rat. ~ Jennifer Weiner

I have lots of favorites movies. I say this only because it's a favorite movie because it's a sport I love. I'm a huge baseball fan. There are movies I like as much as this, but I sort of single this movie out because I'm a baseball nut, and that's 'Field of Dreams.' ~ Rick Santorum

"Why is it sports is the only thing white people see us being successful at? I don't want to play football," he said. "I wanna be a lawyer." "That's fine with me," I said, a little annoyed. "I've just never heard of a Negro lawyer, that's all. You've got to hear of these things before you can imagine them." "Bullshit. You gotta imagine what's never been." ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I don't have the fire in the belly right now. It's one of those been there, done that deals. ~ Steve Largent

…Sugar has become an ingredient avoidable in prepared and packaged foods only by concerted and determined effort, effectively ubiquitous. Not just in the obvious sweet foods (candy bars, cookies, ice creams, chocolates, sodas, juices, sports and energy drinks, sweetened iced tea, jams, jellies, and breakfast cereals both cold and hot), but also in peanut butter, salad dressings, ketchup, BBQ sauces, canned soups, cold cuts, luncheon meats, bacon, hot dogs, pretzels, chips, roasted peanuts, spaghetti sauces, canned tomatoes, and breads. From the 1980's onward manufacturers of products advertised as uniquely healthy because they were low in fat…not to mention gluten free, no MSG, and zero grams trans fat per serving, took to replacing those fat calories with sugar to make them equally…palatable and often disguising the sugar under one or more of the fifty plus names, by which the fructose-glucose combination of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup might be found. Fat was removed from candy bars sugar added, or at least kept, so that they became health food bars. Fat was removed from yogurts and sugars added and these became heart healthy snacks, breakfasts, and lunches. ~ Gary Taubes

Nine-tenths of discipline is having the patience to do things right. ~ Pat Summitt

Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise. ~ Idries Shah

Bro, we're living in the Kali Yuga, a Dark Age of petite bourgeoisie ideology, a petite bourgeoisie ideology whose resources and ruses are infinite and which ubiquitously permeates the world
high culture, low culture, bienpensant media, prestige literature, pop music, commerce, sports, academia, you name it. The only reasonable response to this situation is to maintain an implacable antipathy toward everything. Denounce everyone. Make war against yourself. Guillotine all groveling intellectuals. That said, I think it's important to maintain a cheery disposition. This will hasten the restoration of Paradise. I've memorized this line from Andre Breton's magnificent homage to Antonin Artaud
"I salute Antonin Artaud for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." Given the state of things, that's what we need to be doing, all the time
negating everything that causes us to be dead while alive. ~ Mark Leyner

I never drop a player I only make changes. ~ Bill Shankly

I think the Winter Olympics are definitely on a smaller scale than the summer games, but with the inclusion of cool new sports like slope style skiing and snowboarding, it is going to breathe new life into them and attract a whole new crowd. ~ Nick Goepper

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down. ~ Angus J.L. Menuge

Homophobia and the closet are allies. Like an unhealthy co-dependent relationship they need each other to survive. One plays the victim living in fear and shame while the other plays the persecutor policing what is 'normal'. The only way to dismantle homophobia is for every gay man and lesbian in the world to come out and live authentic lives. Once they realise how normal we are and see themselves in us….the controversy is over.

It is interesting to think what would happen though....on a particularly pre-determined day that every single gay man and lesbian came out. Imagine the impact when, on that day, people all around the world suddenly discovered their bosses, mums, dads, daughters, sons, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, doctors, neighbours, colleagues, politicians, their favourite actors, celebrities and sports heroes, the people they loved and respected......were indeed gay.

All stereotypes would immediately be broken.....just by the same single act of millions of people…..and at last there would no longer be need for secrecy. The closet would become the lounge room. How much healthier would we be emotionally and psychologically when we could all be ourselves doing life without the internal and societal negatives that have been attached to our sexual orientation. ~ Anthony Venn-Brown OAM

I would use sport as an escape from the pain of what was real. Instead of dealing with the pain, instead of being honest about the pain, instead of asking for help - if I had to do it differently, I would do it differently in that regard. ~ R.A. Dickey

I did some sports. It was a bit frustrating. I wasn't the greatest sports person. ~ Tim Burton

A securely attached child will store an internal working model of a responsive, loving, reliable care-giver, and of a self that is worthy of love and attention and will bring these assumptions to bear on all other relationships. Conversely, an insecurely attached child may view the world as a dangerous place in which other people are to be treated with great caution, and see himself as ineffective and unworthy of love. These assumptions are relatively stable and enduring: those built up in the early years of life are particularly persistent and unlikely to be modified by subsequent experience. ~ Jeremy Holmes

Even bear-baiting was esteemed heathenish and unchristian: the sport of it, not the inhumanity, gave offence. ~ Alexander Hume

When experimental psychology limits itself to rats and kittens, squabs and eyelids, philosophy of nature has little opportunity for formation. But when experimental psychology delivers over its findings concerning phenomenal manifestations of the mind, then the philosophy of nature may apply his philosophical principles. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

I like playing frisbee. It is the only sport where you can throw something at a person and it's okay. ~ Demetri Martin

Scott has to be one of the most talented artists I've ever seen. He really captures his subjects in a unique way. He is extremely generous as well. How many artists are willing to donate some of their best works to charity? The Texas Sports Hall of Fame has benefited greatly from Medlock's donated paintings, which are the cornerstones of our auction! ~ Bob Lilly

I am neither a theologian, nor a scholar learned in the history of religions, nor an anthropologist. Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed. To the psychologist the religious propensities of man must be at least as interesting as any other of the facts pertaining to his mental constitution. ~ William James

I learned to give him the ball ... ~ Magic Johnson

There is no sport in hate where all the rage Is on one side. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Searching for funds to continue my skating career when I was 17, I called the Women's Sports Foundation in New York. The intern who answered the phone suggested that I might be a great candidate for the Travel and Training fund, and she sent me an application form. I applied for a grant. With the funds I was awarded, I bought a new pair of skates and a plane ticket to the 1988 National Championships, where I achieved my highest national finish. Four years later, I won the gold medal at the 1992 Olympic Games. ~ Kristi Yamaguchi

I have always said that I want to finish my career with the Dolphins and this put me closer to that goal. I have been fortunate to break many personal records, but my overiding goal is to win a Super Bowl here in Miami. ~ Dan Marino

Absurdly, I haven't yet got around to saying that football is a wonderful sport, but of course it is. Goals have a rarity value that points and runs and sets do not, and so there will always be that thrill, the thrill of seeing someone do something that can only be done three or four times in a whole game if you are lucky, not at all if you are not. And I love the pace of it, its lack of formula; and I love the way that small men can destroy big men ... in a way that they can't in other contact sports, and the way that t he best team does not necessarily win. And there's the athleticism ... , and the way that strength and intelligence have to combine. It allows players to look beautiful and balletic in a way that some sports do not: a perfectly-timed diving header, or a perfectly-struck volley, allow the body to achieve a poise and grace that some sportsmen can never exhibit. ~ Nick Hornby

Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need. ~ Marshall B. Rosenberg

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion. ~ Tariq Ramadan

After years of research, depth psychologists and others argue that each sex carries both the psychological and physical traits of the other. No man is purely masculine, just as there is no purely feminine woman. Jungian psychologists call the feminine characteristics of the male psyche the Anima; the female psyche's masculine characteristics they the Animus.
Both the Animus and Anima develop in complex fashion as the personality grows to maturity. Neither men nor women can reach psychological maturity without integrating their respective contrasexual other. A man's female elements enhance his manhood, just as a woman's male aspects enhance her womanhood. ~ Douglas Gillette

Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads-by-choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the settled disciplines. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

A ball feels different off every player's racket-there are minute but concrete subtleties of force and spin. Now, hitting with her (Steffi Graf), I feel her subtleties. It's like touching her, though we're forty feet apart. Every forehand is foreplay. ~ Andre Agassi

I tried to get a baseball movie made a couple of years ago and I don't think it didn't happen because I was a woman, but because sports movie don't sell internationally. ~ Callie Khouri

Caught in your youniverse again? Try reaching out to the one besides you! ~ Stefan Emunds

Why do you think news of violence and aggression receive huge ratings! It's because the human mind is conditioned to pay more attention to negative events than positive ones, because even if you ignore a positive event, it's very unlikely that something bad will happen to you because of your ignorance, but if you are inattentive to a negative event, you may just lose your life. ~ Abhijit Naskar

When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous "hockey stick" graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology. ~ Christopher Booker

What is nice about this sport is that I am responsible for most everything. ~ Sergei Bubka