Arnold Palmer Quotations | Page 2

Even before you step up to the ball, have a full battle plan for the hole worked out.

We have a great field and I'm very happy about that. It's a tough time of year as it gets closer to the Masters, but I'm appreciative of the players who are here, and I'm expecting a great week.

I suppose I could think of a lot of things to say about the fact that I still play. But I don't really need to. I can tell you this, that I enjoy it. I still enjoy it. I like to get out in the air and I like to walk and I like to do the things that are involved in playing golf.

Golf is a game of inches. The most important are the six inches between your ears.

I enjoyed the fans thoroughly, and they were always helpful. They were the reason that I tried so hard over the years.

I would urge the government to allocate more funds toward fighting cancer. My own situation, it made me think. It made me think about the potential of dying. I wouldn't say I was scared. I'm more scared of how it will happen than of it happening. I'm not scared that I'm going to die. I think of how I'm going to die ... I don't want to linger. That scares me a little. The idea of lingering.

I would like to have won more golf tournaments. But I wouldn't sacrifice my life. I've enjoyed it. I'd love to do it again the same way.

If Tiger Woods slamming his club into the ground is the biggest worry wehave, our sport isinprettygood shape.

I am so pleased with my golf course. I am to say that it's the best I've ever seen it - without equivocation.

Hit it hard, go find it and hit it hard again.

The game has such a hold on golfers because they compete not only against an opponent, but also against the course, against par, and most surely- against themselves.

I think the people I have met have meant a great deal to me, more than any shot I ever hit. I will always remember some golf shots, but others I would like to forget.

I'm in love with golf, and I want everybody else to share my love affair.

When I was growing up, they had just found radio.

Don't be ashamed to play safe.

I talk to golfers, I talk to my grand kids about their game, and tell them to develop a system, Now, when they're young. And if they develop that system, it will be the crutch they need to be good. To know that system and make it work for you, know what it is and make it work.

From the beginning it was drilled into me that a golf course was a place where character fully reveals itself -- both its strengths and its flaws. As a result, I learned early not only to fix my ball marks but also to congratulate an opponent on a good shot, avoid walking ahead of a player preparing to shoot, remain perfectly still when someone else was playing, and a score of other small courtesies that revealed, in my father's mind, one's abiding respect for the game.

I guess most of us would rather not discuss cancer because we are all afraid we might be told we have it. It's hard for people to even say the word, and that's the first obstacle you have to overcome when you are diagnosed with the disease. I think once you understand a little more about it ... I don't mean it gets any easier ... but I think you give it more in-depth thought about how you're going to deal with it.

A lot of people are afraid of winning. I was afraid I might not win.

Golf is deceptively simple, endlessly complicated. A child can play it well and a grown man can never master it. It is almost a science, yet it is a puzzle with no answer.

Timing is everything in life and in golf.

Putting is a fascinating, aggravating, wonderful, terrible and almost incomprehensible part of the game of golf.

The only really unplayable lie I can think of is when you're supposed to be playing golf and come home with lipstick on your collar.

Know how to win by following the rules

I have a psychological feeling about things - and if I have something that I need to accomplish and I accomplish it, I let down after that, and that happened to me in golf.

The thing I probably love the most is driving out with the championship trophy under my arm.

Players need to remember they didn't make golf. Golf made them.

You must play boldly to win.

I think today's athletes generally are spoiled by what's happened to salaries, but I also think that golfers have maintained the best demeanor of any sport.

I have had a love affair with Wake Forest since my undergraduate days, but I didn’t realize until many years later what I had truly learned at Wake Forest, both in and out of the classroom, about the meaning of a productive and meaningful life,

For years I did take my time, but that was because I hated waiting to hit shots - I adopted a pace where I didn't have to stand by my ball and wait.

I’m particularly proud of anything the House and the Senate agree on,

Swing your swing. I know, I did.

I would like to say, however, that a man might be walking around lucky and not know it unless he tries.

There's some good news, too, and the good news is that the players [finally] have become more aware of the fact that we [in golf] need sponsors, and we need the good will that is created by the players being, let's say, cooperative with the sponsors - meaning friendly.

One thing I've learned over time is, if you hit a golf ball into water, it won't float.

When I was in college, I thought about becoming an attorney. But I wasn't smart enough; I hate being cooped up indoors; and I'm too nice a guy.

I received many years of good advice from my father - how to live, how to play, how to be a gentleman.

If you are really serious about playing golf and playing good golf, stick to the basic fundamentals. Sure, there's going to be a little change here and a change there, but you don't want to make them. You want to stick to the things that you started with, and you learned, and you know how to apply them.

Golf never ceases to be a challenge, even when it really is just you and the ball out there and nobody else.

Frankly, I'm not much for funerals unless it's absolutely an obligation. I don't feel it serves much of a purpose to go and see my friends just lying there, dead. I try to pay my respects to my friends when they're alive.

As long as I can stay competitive and have fun doing what I'm doing, I guess I'll keep doing it.

I can only tell you one thing that I do know for sure, I am a dreamer. There are not many people that will recognize or want to recognize the fact that they are dreamers in their own life ... I continue to get up in the morning,enthusiastically, and go pick up a golf club with a thought that I can somewhere find that secret to making the cut. That's just an example, but it applies to other things in life, too, and that's the way I live and the way I think and the way I feel.

I feel more strongly than ever about this. I would like the professional game freed of golf carts. Golf is a physical game. If we are playing competitive professional golf, we should walk. When I can't walk 18 holes, I'll pack it in.

Your worst putt will usually be as good as your best chip.

I have won the Australian, I won the British, all PGA championships, but I haven't won the PGA championship.

I never felt I could be a complete professional without having won the British Open. It was something you had to do to complete your career.

You can describe my round as having moments of ecstasy and stark raving terror. I looked like I knew what I was doing at times and at other times I looked like a twenty handicap player.

When you play by the rules, defy mental demons, overcome every challenge, and enjoy a walk in the country at the same time - that's being alive.

When you get into competition and get under pressure, and get over that ball and are looking at it, and know you have to hit it, it is having that system to depend on to get that ball to where you want it to be.

I always said that if I have the perfect club then I should play the perfect game.

I would never felt good if I hadn't experienced losing, because losing is part of your life. And it something that if I could teach people to understand that I think it could help them a lot.

I look back, it taught me something - it taught me how to live, how to be a better guy, not let defeat be the end of my life.

I remember ones I lost [shot]. I remember the ones I won, but I remember the ones I lost, something that I will never forget. Did it ruin me or hurt my career? It taught me about life, how to take the bad with the good.

The game is so fantastic, and people who get into it love it so much...I'd be pleased with that. There's no game like it.

I had a system, and the system worked.

A lot of tournaments that I can remember I made a few bad shots and I was afraid I would lose the tournament and it seemed to work, the putts seemed to go in. Just the Desire.

It is such a disappointment in American political reaction and actions. When some of our politicians are flying around the country in private airplanes all the time, using public services as their mode of private transportation, and then criticizing us who are in business.

I played with [Dwight Eisenhower] on the day after I won the Masters at his request. We became everlasting friends. I was with him the day before he died at Walter Reed.

We just became very good friends [ with Dwight Eisenhower ], we played golf, we played heart exhibitions. Then his doctor said he should not play golf anymore.

I would not have been able to accomplish a lot of what I did professionally had I not learned to fly myself and owned an airplane. For example, I was able to fly to an exhibition for the day and be back home in time for dinner. I never would have been able to do that flying commercially.

Winning is a drive, it's a thing that you feel like when I go to bed at night I go to sleep.

I played high school golf, I played amateur golf and I started getting officers. I was playing pretty good, won amateur tournaments as a junior, and the whole thing.

I like the Miami because I could play golf all winter.

I've noticed the sound of the golf ball being hit by the golf club is different, and much more realistic, with the hearing aids. The sound with the hearing aids makes sense, and better represents what I know is happening to the golf ball. So you could say that the hearing aids help give me confidence regarding my golf game.

All the things that I have derived either directly or indirectly through the game of golf are things I owe a great deal to the game and to the people who support the game.

I think the guys are more conscious of the fact that being in good physical condition under the conditions that they play will make them better players.

I can't afford the luxury of music while I'm flying an airplane. I have to pay attention to what I'm doing.

In my early days of flying, if you flew on instruments, you were inevitably going to fly in thunderstorms. That was just a part of the business of flying.

That's another thing about my father. He made me very conscious of the fact I wasn't very good and I had to prove to him that I was good. And that hung with me, and I always wanted to play golf with him and show him. He said Never, Never tell anyone how good you are. Show them!

I was born in 1929, that was the depression, so the golf course was manned by my father and two guys, they worked for my dad and they took me with them everywhere they went. And it was fun.

I wanted to emulate my father. I wanted to be as tough as he was. I wanted to do the things that he did. I watched him.

I was the first son and first child. When my sister came along, well, she was two years younger, and I had to go to the golf course because my mother couldn't handle all the action going on. So I came with father to the golf course since I was a year and a half old and I spent the day with him here, and it worked in naturally. And it was fun for me being with my father, and doing things that a kid did it was great.

I was playing cowboys and Indians in the trees, and then I started hitting the golf club with clubs father sawed off for me, and I began playing right here with my father.

If you can concentrate on what you're doing and have the desire to do the things you have to do to win, you'll succeed.

I worked for dad on the grounds and I was in high school and I said I wanted to go to college, and he said, well, you figure it out. He said I will pay for your college but you're going to go to St. Vincent. St. Vincent College right here. That's about as much as I can afford, you work here, right here at home. I said, what if I can get somewhere else? And he said if I can get there, that's your call.

The fans, I loved them. My mother would be in the gallery, I would look right at my mother and not remember.

I love America. I wanted to play golf.

I started [flying] by being scared. When I was an amateur I played a couple tournaments and I had to fly, and got into weather and stuff, and it scared me, and I decided that would not work, I had to learn to fly, I had to find out about airplanes and aeronautical engineering and what it was all about.

If the athlete is fair with the press, he deserves fairness back.

I enjoy the press. I understand their business.

My father started on this golf course at Latrobe when he was sixteen years old. He was digging ditches when they were building the golf course.

I've always been a big thinker that the more international competition that we create through sports the better relationships we'll have with countries.

Between now and 35 could be the absolute best years of his life.

Between now and 35 could be the absolute best years of his life. It would be very easy for that to happen, meaning that he could double or triple what he has done in the past.

I've been playing there since 1955, but now I'm not so sure.

They are all talented and they all have great swings. I don't know that I can keep up with them.

To not recognize it as a major is too bad.

That should be classified as one of the major championships,

Sam has displayed his talent through the past couple of years and this is an opportunity for a young man to get out and get some experience in the game that might not otherwise come his way. We, we'll see how he does with the big boys. I think that will be great.

Tell you what ... I'll wear it at the next tournament I play in.

This is one of the few tournaments I've won by finishing with a double-bogey.

I like the new format because it's a good blend of the older and younger guys out here. We had a hard time getting into a rhythm, but we still had our chances at the end. It was disappointing in some ways, but I still had a good time.

If there's an event, and something would happen where I thought I could enhance an event and play some kind of reasonable golf, I might do it, ... But I do not have any plans and am not making any plans at this point.

I'm looking forward to the dinner, that's why I'm here. I miss driving down Magnolia Lane and not having my clubs ready to play, but that's the way it is now.

I loved the quaintness of Orlando in those days. It was an old farm town, a great place, but not really on the map.

I'm getting to the point where I'm going to just sort of fade away,

I guess that is one of the most humbling things that has happened to me, the fact the golfers of the world and just the fans have been so supportive, so responsive to what I do and what I am and where I'm going,

I just hope I can keep him from being embarrassed by my poor golf.

I'll tell you how optimistic I am: I've been married less than a year, and I'm building my wife a new house, ... She's putting in all these things to keep me going, and rocking chairs are one of them. But I'm not going to use them for a while.