Browsing Topic Best Basketball Player Quotes

Talent is God-given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.

Be more concerned with your character than your reputation.

When I lose the sense of motivation and the sense to prove something as a basketball player, it’s time for me to move away from the game.

When I was young, everyone laughed at me when I said that I wanted to be a professional basketball player…now it’s my turn to laugh.

We blacks look for leadership in men and women of such youth and inexperience, as well as poverty of education and character, that it is no wonder that we sometimes seem rudderless…. We see basketball players and pop singers as possible role models, when nothing could be further, in most cases, from their capacities.

My idol when I was growing up was Michael Jordan the basketball player because of his work ethic rather than his talent and because of what he went through to be as good as he was.

Great players never look in the mirror and think I’m a great basketball player. You ask yourself, Am I the best player I can be?

There is no such thing as a perfect basketball player, and I don’t believe there is only one greatest player either.

The idea is not to block every shot. The idea is to make your opponent believe that you might block every shot.

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player.

Basic dance–and I should qualify the word basic–is primarily concerned with motion. So immediately you will say but the basketball player is concerned with motion. That is so–but he is not concerned with it primarily. His action is a means towards an end beyond motion. In basic dance the motion is its own end–that is, it is concerned with nothing beyond itself.

I’m a fan and a friend, I met them in 1974 when I first joined the NBA and my life has never been he same since. I became the basketball player I was because of the Grateful Dead.

There is still an assumption among many people that to be black is to be lower class. In the last fifteen to twenty years, perhaps even further back than that, there’s also been an explosion of a very wealthy black class in the United States, but those people are often treated as special cases: they’re athletes, entertainers. Jay-Z. Basketball players. The country metabolizes the fact these rich black people exist, but it seems only to reinforce the idea that every other black person is limping along in poverty.

In America, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the Occupy movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

Adam [Sandler] is a good basketball player, so he is a natural athlete, he worked with Sean Salisbury to make his footwork and delivery smooth, and he did a great job.

Every little kid that steps on the court or the field has aspirations to go pro. I think being a pro basketball player is the best job. The thing I had to realize was that I can’t do every dream that I have.

Do your best when no one is looking.

Scientists contribute in a variety of ways and I don’t think I can singular one even including [Albert] Einstein, that I can say that he’s the best. We don’t work like the best basketball player and the best musician and so on. Science is a collective effort.

As a kid, I always idolized entrepreneurs. I thought they were cool people in the way that I thought basketball players were cool people. It’s cool that some people get paid to dunk basketballs, but I’m not one of those people.

I always wanted to be a basketball player until I discovered Pizza Pockets.

Play more than one sport in high school. If you play, say, football and basketball, you can learn to be physical and you can take those physical aspects of both sports and become better in both sports. Basketball players use some of the same skills football players do and vice versa.

Concentration and mental toughness are the margins of victory.

[When] I was young and I listened to everything – I took everything to heart. I didn’t really realize how much people want to talk badly about you when you’re down, or kick you when you’re down. As basketball players, people think everybody’s ultra-confident. But that’s not the case.

If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can. I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we’d beat everybody.

Systems win! Believe in your system, and then sell it to your players.

My goal is to let people see who I am as a person, not just a basketball player. Many people see athletes in a certain way – flat and one dimensional. I want to change that view.

If we can take young people who excel at the highest levels, put them on the same kind of pedestal as the all-state basketball player and the all-state football player, and begin to get the same kind of recognition, it will have a profound effect, and we are finding that it does.

Do your best when no one is looking. If you do that, then you can be successful at anything you put your mind to

I’m pretty fundamental when it comes to running. A basketball player doesn’t practice his free throw shooting by doing slam dunks all over the place. He does it by practicing free throws. That’s the attitude I take: You don’t get better at running by doing everything but running. You get better by running.

These are my new shoes. They’re good shoes. They won’t make you rich like me, they won’t make you rebound like me, they definitely won’t make you handsome like me. They’ll only make you have shoes like me. That’s it.

I know I’m never as good or bad as one single performance. I’ve never believed in my critics or my worshippers, and I’ve always been able to leave the game at the arena.

The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not.

I don’t try to get players emotionally up for a game; it creates too many peaks and valleys… I strive for even keel; they will get up for the big games.

I’m fighting against becoming soft. That’s the worst thing you can say to a basketball player.