Phil Knight Quotes

I feel, in the end, as if everything I've done has been a failure.

I was planning to be a baseball player until I ran into something called a curveball. And that set me back.

Many a person who started out to conquer the world in shining army has ended up just getting along. The horse got tired, the army rusty. The goal was removed and unsure.

I think that there were only two people in my high school that were comfortable there, and I think they are both pumping gas now.

But I was so wrapped up in sports growing up as a kid, that I think I was going to grow to be a pro ball player. But I found out real quick that was not going to happen.

Every kid in America dreams of playing in the big leagues and they don't, just because. It's not because they blew out their knee. It's just because they didn't make it.

My dream was to become a ballet dancer, but after a year in bed with rheumatic fever at 13, I had grown too tall, and had no muscle tone left. I tried a ballet class and couldn't even do a plie without falling over. It was my first death.

For a long time, I felt like I failed myself, my career, and my record company.

My parents were ambitious people, my father especially, whose entire life was devoted to rising above, but his ambitions were defeated long before death finished them off, and so when he died, he came back to where he started, but he didn't come back home, because there was no home to come back to.

It's definitely hard being taken from your dream, especially when you're trying to accomplish something.

I dreamed of turning pro as an Olympic medallist but I ended up turning pro as the kid who failed to make the Olympics.

I obviously hoped that everything that I found would make a difference. It ended up being way behind my wildest dreams.

Whoa. If high school was suppose to be the best years of my life - at least so far - I was truly destined to have a sucky adulthood.

There's also this weirdness to California, this darkness, it's a place where people come to follow their dreams and sometimes don't make it.

My life's dream has been a perpetual nightmare.

I went to college to be a jock and to play on the baseball team. And then, I got cut and realized that that was it for that. I was really small. The other guys were really big, on that team. I was a bit of a theater nerd, and I was an art history major.

Not making the baseball team at West Point was one of the greatest disappointments of my life, maybe my greatest.

Expectation brings frustration. Private ambitions bring failures.

Mind the gap - it's the distance between life as you dream it and life as it is.

All the things she planned to feel, the way she planned to look and seem, the appropriate things she planned to say. None of them came to pass.

She chased after her dream with much desire, but when she got to close to her expectations, well the dream burned up like paper in fire.

I guess there's a lot we hope for that never happens.

I’ve lived to bury my desires, And see my dreams corrode with rust; Now all that’s left are fruitless fires That burn my empty heart to dust.

Later our dreams begin catching fire around the edges, they burn like paper, we wake with our hands full of ash.

Do not despair. Heroes rarely live up to to our expectations