208 Quotes by Phil Knight

He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend.

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.

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.

We must all be professors of the jungle.

Ať se vám to líbí nebo ne, život je jako sport, život je jako hra. Kdokoli se od takové pravdy odvrací, kdokoli prostě odmítne hrát, zůstane stát za postranní čarou, a to jsem nechtěl. Víc než cokoli jeného jsem přesně tohle nechtěl.

maybe the cure for any burnout is to work harder.

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 and 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.

Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.

In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor. Change never comes as fast as we want it. Pg 374