Top 1200 Tennis Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

I know some of my self-worth comes from tennis, and it's hard to think of doing something else where you know you'll never be thebest. Tennis players are rare creatures: where else in the world can you know that you're the best? The definitiveness of it is the beauty of it, but it's not all there is to life and I'm ready to explore the alternatives.

Serena and I have done some great career planning, and we're playing really at the peak of our tennis right now. I think tennis has been a sport where people play this insane schedule from 14 years old, so of course at 26, it's over. We've really paced ourselves.

I love tennis. I've played it my whole life. Loved it since the age of three. I had an injury, so from the age of 13 to 24 I didn't play much. Then when I moved out to L.A., there were so many tennis courts that I rekindled the love.

Masculinity comes from your look, all the way down to your attitude. It's a big part of being a tennis player. Even though tennis is a fairly friendly sport, intimidation is still a big part of it.

I used to go swimming and passed the tennis courts every day, and that's how it started. My mum said, 'Why don't you play tennis in your summer holidays because you have nothing to do except swim for an hour or whatever?,' and that's how I started playing.

It is hard because I have played since I was three years old, and everything is tennis, tennis. I am super-passionate about it. And I love it. But I always like to cook, I listen to music. I just try to be like a regular girl.

The whole idea is to propose an immersive experience. When you watch tennis, you watch from the outside, you're far from the court, the camera is far away and the whole story is about two persons hitting a tennis ball and trying to win.

I love my life. I commentate for Eurosport, so you could say I've reached the final of every grand slam since 2002 when I started that. I love what I do, and I love playing tennis with amateurs, regular guys, helping to teach them to enjoy tennis more.

I felt sad because everyday I had to wake up early to practice before going to school. After school I had to go back to tennis again, and then after tennis I had homework. I didn't have time to play.

Strangely, although they may seem worlds apart, boxing and tennis have a certain kinship. Two individuals head-to-head, probing for weakness and attacking it. Footwork, timing and stamina are essential. Just you and your opponent until one of you is beaten. There's no brain damage in tennis - although sometimes I wonder.

I'm a huge tennis fan, so the game I play the most is 'Top Spin.' You really have to know how to play tennis to get good at this game - whether you want to hit a forehand or a backhand, when's the best time to hit a slice - it's so real.

Actors need bricks to play with, and in fact we rejected all the improvised fragments we had made without a plan. Improvisation without a plan is like tennis without tennis balls.

I just want to be able to show who I really am, what I can do, bring awareness, create something because I want to take tennis, women's tennis, into an even more exciting path because I believe we have a lot more things to offer.

It's good to have someone on the tour so close to you - I mean, like, my sister. There is no one closer to me on the tour, so I don't need any other friends than her. We always talk about everything; not only about tennis, but about all the other stuff around tennis.

Professionalism in tennis ... only resulted in making billionaires out of rude children, producing an onslaught of moody defectors, and a lot of guys with hair that looks as if bats slept in it... Meanwhile, my head swims with the thought that I have watched tennis progress from Don Budge and Alice Marble to Farrah Fawcett becoming John McEnroe's mother-in-law.

I think my family needs me more than anybody else, and tennis doesn't need me anymore. I respect my wife a lot for taking all that in. She said, 'I didn't marry a tennis player; you'd retired.' Now it's time to do something else.

A man who waits to believe in action before acting is anything you like, but he's not a man of action. It is as if a tennis player before returning a ball stopped to think about his views of the physical and mental advantages of tennis. You must act as you breathe.

It means everything, definitely. I mean, it's Wimbledon. Tennis here is tennis history. Centre Court is always great to play on. I really feel like I'm at home. I was really up and down after my title here in 2011, but I still worked hard and believed in myself, and my team believed in me as well.

When I was 13, tennis became more of my life. It's when I gave up skiing, I gave up winter sports. I still played varsity basketball my freshman year of high school - basketball was the last sport I gave up for my tennis.

My father had never watched tennis, never liked tennis too much. He said, 'OK, we buy a racket, we watch together,' because we didn't know anything. It was a process of learning together that made it more interesting.

Tennis has never been the most important thing in my life. My family, my health, my happiness...they are more important to me. On court, I want to win. Off court, I want to be a better person. Tennis is a path to my future.

Maybe I was accepted to Harvard only because of my tennis skills, since I definitively had no great academic achievements. I was 17 and only thought about surfing and playing tennis. I had almost never left Rio de Janeiro and had never been to the United States.

I think everything I do in my life I try to have fun, and I try to be creative on the tennis court, outside the tennis court.

I play a lot of tennis, a lot of quite hard tennis.

I'm more in that Rafa Nadal high-energy high-octane mold out there. I wear that emotion on the court. That's how I play my best tennis. People either like that or not. And I can't change that: that's who I am on a tennis court.

What I've realised is that you can run miles, jump on a bike, lift weights, and all that other garbage, but the bottom line is that you get in tennis shape by playing tennis. You build the right muscles, and I don't believe people can do it as successfully any other way.

If a child is poor in math but good at tennis, most people would hire a math tutor. I would rather hire a tennis coach.

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

To be honest I never watch a tennis match. I watch basketball a lot, soccer, never tennis.

Tennis is a traditional game. A big sport like tennis does not need too many changes. The game has become too fast, there are hardly any long, interesting rallies these days. So maybe slowing down the courts could help. But you can't really stop a sport from evolving.

If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that's a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life, and there's going to be a life after tennis that's a lot longer than your tennis life.

As tennis players, we work and we sacrifice many things. To lose, that's not a happy thing - I mean sure, I was disappointed. You have to come back strong. But to win the last point in a grand slam tournament, that's the most beautiful and most satisfying feeling you can get as a tennis player. It's worth it.

I was fighting for tennis, I was an evangelist for tennis, and it was literally just passion that kept pushing and pushing, and the amount of times that the word "no" was said to me was beyond logic. I think in life I've always been the guy who, if popular opinion is one thing, if common sense is one thing, I'll go the other way.

Tennis is not always that accessible but I sometimes think badminton is harder - tennis you can always play against the wall but badminton is tough to even play outdoors with the wind.

Each weekend I play at least one and maybe two sets of tennis a day. My doubles team was in the finals recently at my tennis club in Palm Beach and lost a tiebreaker after a three-hour match. I must confess, by the end of the three hours, I was relieved it was over.

With a tennis racket strapped tightly to her hiking pack, Martina Navratilova began her ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. The tennis legend had visions of celebrating at the summit of Africa's highest peak by hitting a couple balls to see how far they might fly in the thin air at 19,341 feet.

Tennis players need to be very focused and very intense, and I can show tennis players are not just hitting the little yellow ball and moving in between the white lines. I'm always trying to show my personality outside of the court.

The fact that nobody played tennis in my family and you'd say by chance they make three tennis courts in front of the restaurant that my family owned when I was 4, I think that's a destiny. That's kind of life circumstances that kind of come together for you to become who you want to become.

I don't like anything that's "just an escape." To me the best part of golf is that, unlike my tennis game, I can actually get better. I've probably reached my plateau in tennis, but in golf I have a lot of room for improvement. I really enjoy working on my game. I like practicing. I chart my rounds.

Receiving the Newcombe Medal for a third year in a row is an amazing honour. The Newcombe Medal is a great occasion for the Australian tennis community to come together and celebrate our sport, recognise people's achievements and contributions to Australian tennis.

If I have a daughter and she plays tennis, and I have a son who plays tennis, I wouldn't say that my son deserves more money because he's a man. I would say they deserve the same amount of money.

Why do I wear tennis shoes? That's two questions. Do I wear tennis shoes? The answer to that question is, "Yes." "Why?" That's a question philosophers have been pondering for centuries.

That's why I enjoy Davis Cup, and I really enjoyed college tennis. It's very special. You want to go out there and compete your hardest, because you don't want to let anyone down. You want to absolutely give it your all for your team. And that's sort of the mentality I've taken to pro tennis.

I've been around tennis, and I have a feeling for the sport. I still play tennis, and I can still do a lot of harm to a lot of people.

If I'm being honest, I think I'd be good at television; I just don't know if I am interested, because you are kind of geographically responsible to a location, and frankly I don't know if I retired from tennis so that I could sit around tennis tournaments 12 hours a day.

The world over - 50 million children start playing tennis, 5 million learn to play tennis, 500,000 learn professional tennis, 50,000 come to the circuit, 5000 reach the grand slam, 50 reach Wimbledon, 4 to semi final, 2 to the finals, when I was holding a cup I never asked GOD 'Why me?'. And today in pain I should not be asking GOD 'Why me?'

Sometimes it's harder to play good tennis with a bad tennis player - the same way it's hard to be a good actor with a bad actor. It's just an unpleasant experience.

I decided to practice alone because it was a challenge for me to see how much I love tennis. And making sure I was not trying just to respond to other people's expectations and that I really wanted it myself. I realized that I just loved tennis, that it was something extraordinary, that I would really want to do that.

You know, I still love the innocent parts of the game. I love hitting tennis balls. I love seeing the young guys do well. I'll still have a lot of friends to watch. I'll miss the relationships probably the most. As time passes, I'll probably miss the tennis more.

I think tennis is very different than most of the other sports when you have the opportunity to go pro. For me, it was pretty simple. Tennis was always an individual sport, and your direct results determined where you could go and what you could do.

I came to America because of a tennis scholarship. I really wanted to get away because I was really frustrated about my injury so my mother said, "Go to America for four months and just open your eyes and see that there's more things than tennis." That's what happened.

Never read bad stuff if you're an artist; it will impair your own game. I don't know if you ever played competitive tennis, but you learn not to watch bad tennis; it messes up your game. Art's the same way.

To me, mixed doubles is an undervalued tennis product. You have guys and girls playing on the same level, no handicaps. The guys aren't feeling bad for the girls. The girls pick on the guys. It's generally amazing tennis.

One thing my dad always told me, was he would make sure I always had what he didn't have. He couldn't play basketball because he didn't have tennis shoes - so I had five pairs of tennis shoes.

I really like the smell of the tennis balls, the new ones. I don't need to do it, but it's just my habit, what I do on the court when we change for the new tennis balls. I just smell them. Maybe it's for luck. I've been doing it all my life.

In tennis, a lot of parents are accused of driving their kids into tennis. I would say I'm the opposite: I drove my parents into it. They didn't take it that seriously until I was about 11 or 12 years old, when they realised I had an opportunity to go pro.

If they had rankings in baseball, maybe I would have been able to do the math and figure out my chances of being a professional baseball player versus a tennis player. But that was the decision-maker for me, I just thought I was better in tennis.

An idea has no worth at all without believable characters to implement it; a plot without characters is like a tennis court without players. Daffy Duck is to a Buck Rogers story what John McEnroe was to tennis. Personality. That is the key, the drum, the fife. Forget the plot.

I did interviews with tennis greats, like James Blake and John Isner. I also interviewed tennis pros who aren't well - known but who made all the same sacrifices but had just a little spark of a professional career and are now still orbiting the sport, either as a teaching pro or a coach.

My father actually moved out from Chicago just so he could play tennis 365 days a year, so it was - it was a place we played every day. We played before school. We played after school. We woke up. We played tennis. We brushed our teeth in that order.