Top 52 Quotes & Sayings by Knute Rockne

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

Generalities don't count and won't help you in football.

It isn't necessary to see a good tackle. You can hear it.

Win or lose, do it fairly.

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.

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

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

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

On the road we're somebody else's guests - and we play in a way that they're not going to forget we visited them.

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

Build up your weaknesses until they become your strong points.

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

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

Football is a game played with arms, legs and shoulders but mostly from the neck up.

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

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.

The secret is to work less as individuals and more as a team. As a coach, I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven.

It's my show.

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

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

One loss is good for the soul, Too many losses is not good for the coach.

We can all be geniuses because one definition of genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains.

A coach's greatest asset is his sense of responsibility - the reliance placed on him by his players.

Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.

If I flop, let 'em pan me.

Yes, I know that you feel you are not strong enough. That's what the enemy thinks too. But we're gonna fool them.

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

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

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

Drink the first. Sip the second slowly. Skip the third.

Let's win one for the Gipper.

Make the present good, and the past will take care of itself.

No star playing, just football.

Never tell 'em how many lettermen you've got coming back. Tell 'em how many you lost.

I have to get the most energy out of a man and have discovered that it cannot be done if he hates another man. Hate blocks his energy and he isn't up to par until he eliminates it and develops a friendly feeling...(towards all his teammates.)

There is not economy in getting cheap service or equipment. Buy the best and cry only once.

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.

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.

All the world loves a winner and has no time for a loser.

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.

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

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.

Yes, I know that you feel you are not strong enough. That's what the enemy thinks, too. But we're gonna fool them.

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

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

The secret of winning is working more as a team, less as individuals.

Boards, boards, boards.

If winning isn't everything why bother to keep the score?

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

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

An automobile goes nowhere efficiently unless it has a quick, hot spark to ignite things, to set the cogs of the machine in motion. So I try to make every player on my team feel he's the spark keeping our machine in motion.

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