Vince Lombardi

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.

A man can be as great as he wants to be. If you believe in yourself and have the courage, the determination, the dedication, the competitive drive and if you are willing to sacrifice the little things in life and pay the price for the things that are worthwhile, it can be done.

It’s easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you’re a winner, when you’re number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you’re not a winner.

The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.

Excellence must be pursued, it must be wooed with all of one’s might and every bit of effort that we have each day there’s a new encounter, each week is a new challenge.

The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

As there is a use in medicine for poisons, so the world cannot move without rogues.

I’ve also learned that a real mouth-smile always has an eye-smile to go with it. So watch out, I say, when someone smiles at you but his eyes stay the same. It’s sure to be a phony.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don’t even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child — our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

If you can’t fly, then run, if you can’t walk run, then walk, if you can’t walk, then crawl, but by all means keep moving.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

I am not much an advocate for traveling, and I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?

I think that people just have this core desire to express who they are. And I think that’s always existed.

We are reformers in the spring and summer, but in autumn we stand by the old. Reformers in the morning, and conservers at night.

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.