Top 24 Cockiness Quotes & Sayings

What people don't realize is they mistake my shyness for cockiness most of the time.

Don't confuse confidence with cockiness. I really believe that.

I'm a very modest person. But I'm also extremely confident. And if you put me in the situation or in the moment, I'm gonna have some swagger, I'm gonna have some cockiness.

Before the game, getting guys in the right mindset and confident - you play well when you're confident. People can say 'cockiness' or whatever, but there are results when you play with a confidence and you believe in yourself.

An athlete must have a certain cockiness to succeed and win, but an athlete must also care about the game he or she plays.

To be a star and stay a star, I think you've got to have a certain air of arrogance about you, a cockiness, a swagger on the field that says, "I can do this and you can't stop me." I know that I play baseball with this air of arrogance, but I think it's lacking in a lot of guys who could have the potential to be stars.

Fighter pilot is an attitude. It is cockiness. It is aggressiveness. It is self-confidence. It is a streak of rebelliousness, and it is competitiveness. But there's something else - there's a spark. There's a desire to be good. To do well; in the eyes of your peers, and in your own mind.

A lot of times, people take other people's confidence for cockiness, airheadedness, rashness or brashness, and that's the light in which they see you when you say you always knew you'd be a champion, blah blah blah. Well, you have to be confident in the sport we do. As an athlete, in general, you have to be confident.

You know I need that cockiness, the self-belief, arrogance, swagger, whatever you want to call it, I need that on the golf course to bring the best out of myself. So you know once I leave the golf course, you know that all gets left there.

Much as my Boomer friends will hate me for saying this, Kanye West is the New Dylan. Not only do Kanye's best lyrics match Dylan's prescience, highly inventive word-play and genius for storytelling, his indefatigable cockiness eerily channels Muhammad Ali.

It's easy to get swept up in the trappings of that sort of lifestyle, but I've been doing it for long enough that I know how easy it is to fall victim to that sort of arrogance and cockiness that celebrity culture can bring about, in young men especially.

You have to be confident when you've got someone in front of you who wants to beat you and take the title from you. But I think people mistake my confidence for arrogance or cockiness.

It [boxing] helps my hand-eye coordination, my stamina, my footwork, and it gives me that competitive edge and drive. And in the ring it's mano-a-mano. So it helps you build that arrogance, that cockiness, that confidence in yourself that the man that stands in front of you isn't going to beat you, and that translates to the court.

I think a lot of people mistake my confidence on stage for cockiness in real life, and that's actually farthest from the truth. When I'm on stage I'm that confident and that cocky, because I have a microphone in my hand, and there's a few thousand people staring at me. And I know they're there to laugh.

I'm very confident in what I do, but I'd like to think I don't ever show any kind of cockiness or overconfidence.

I think a lot of people mistake my confidence on stage for cockiness in real life, and that's actually farthest from the truth. When I'm on stage, I'm that confident and that cocky because I have a microphone in my hand, and there's a few thousand people staring at me. And I know they're there to laugh.

I've been shocked by film actors - 25 and under - having such confidence and cockiness to rewrite a scene. My background is more about the director being in control. It's all about yielding. It's an oddly submissive relationship in which you're moulded, Pygmalion-style.

I never try to get ahead of myself because there's nothing that bothers me more than cockiness. I don't think that's necessary at all.

The fact that so many comics were waiting to jump on the bandwagon of hate toward me - what is it about me that engages this kind of behavior? I began to see it: My cockiness, my lack of hanging out with other comics. A lot of that wasn't my fault.

Confidence, not cockiness. Knowing who you are is confidence. Cockiness is knowing who you are and pushing it down everyone's throat.

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.

When you walk in a room, the room should feel that this guy's different. What does he do? Who is he? And that's confidence, not cockiness.

Ah, how the seeds of cockiness blossom when soiled in ignorance.

I'm a very modest person. But I'm also extremely confident. And if you put me in the situation or in the moment, I'm gonna have some swagger, I'm gonna have some cockiness