| Archer, George | One thing about golf is you don’t know why you play bad and why you play good. |
| Barkow, Al | The best stroked putt in a lifetime does not bring the aesthetic satisfaction of a perfectly hit wood or iron shot. There is nothing to match the whoosh and soar, the almost magical flight of a beautifully hit drive or 5-iron. |
| Bolt, Tommy | Putting allows the touchy golfer two to four opportunities to blow a gasket in the short space of two to forty feet. |
| Boros, Julius | Retire to what? I’m a golfer and a fisherman. I’ve got no place to retire to. |
| Brewer, Gay | One bad shot does not make a losing score. |
| Burke, Sr., Jack | Let the ball get in the way of the swing instead of making the ball the object. |
| Burke, Sr., Jack | What you might learn in six months of practice—your pro can tell you in five minutes. |
| Burke, Sr., Jack | When in trouble, play the shot you know you can play—not the shot you hope you can play. |
| Carolan, Ernest | There’s something haunting about getting up at dawn and walking a golf course, checking pin placements. It’s easy to lose track of reality. |
| Churchill, Winston | Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a very small hole, with weapons singularly ill designed for the purpose. |
| Clinton, Bill | The great thing about this game is that the bad days are wonderful. |
| Cotton, Henry | Imagine the ball has little legs, and chop them off. |
| Crenshaw, Ben | Golf is the hardest game in the world. There’s no way you can ever get it. Just when you think you do, the games jumps up and puts you into your place. |
| Duval, David | I would like to think of myself as an athlete first, but I don’t want to do a disservice to the real ones. |
| Eisenhower, Dwight D. | Give me the strength to hit it easy. |
| Faldo, Nick | Golf is not about the quality of your good shots; it is about the quality of your bad shots. |
| Hagen, Walter | Every golfer can expect to have four bad shots a round. When you do, just put them out of your mind. |
| Hagen, Walter | Make the hard ones look easy and the easy ones look hard. |
| Hagen, Walter | You don’t have the game you played last year or last week. You only have today’s game…harden your heart and make the best of it. |
| Harrelson, Ken | In baseball you hit your home run over the right-field fence, the left-field fence, the center-field fence. Nobody cares. In golf everything has to go right over second base. |
| Hogan, Ben | Everyday you miss playing or practicing—is one day longer it will take for you to be good. |
| Hogan, Ben | Golf is not a game of good shots, it’s a game of bad shots. |
| Hogan, Ben | I only hit three or four shots a round that flew exactly as I wanted them to. |
| Hogan, Ben | I see no reason why a golf course cannot be played in 18 birdies. Just because no one has ever done that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. |
| Hogan, Ben | The lessons you learn on your own are the ones you retain. |
| Hogan, Ben | The most important shot in golf is the next one. |
| Hogan, Ben | There isn’t enough daylight in any one day to practice all the shots you need to. |
| Hogan, Ben | There’s nothing natural about the golf swing. |
| Hope, Bob | If I’m on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast. If God wants to play through, let him. |
| Jenkins, Dan | The golfer has more enemies than any other athlete. He has 14 clubs in his bag, all of them different; 18 holes to play, and all round him are sand, trees, grass, water, wind. |
| Jones, Bobby | Golf is like eating peanuts. You can play too much or play too little. |
| Jones, Bobby | Golf is most assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case. |
| Jones, Bobby | The secret of shooting low scores is the ability to turn three shots into two. |
| Jones, Bobby | When I think about three things during my swing I’m playing poorly; when I think about two things, I have a chance to shoot par; when I think of only one thing I could win the tournament. |
| Jones, Bobby | When reading greens, I have never been able to see more rolls and bumps in a minute then I could in five seconds. |
| Jones, Bobby | You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about. |
| Jones, Jr., Robert Trent | Every hole should be a difficult par and a comfortable bogey. |
| Lema, Tony | Practice does not make perfect—if it’s mistakes you’re practicing. |
| Littler, Gene | Golf is not a game of great shots. It’s a game of the most accurate misses. The people who win make the smallest mistakes. |
| Locke, Bobby | You can tell a good putt by the sound it makes. |
| Mantle, Mickey | He who has the fastest cart never has a bad lie. |
| McEnroe, John | Is golf really a sport, in all honesty? I thought in a sport you had to run at some point. |
| Miller, Johnny | Everyone has his own choking level, a level at which he fails to play his normal golf. As you get more experienced, your choking level rises. |
| Miller, Johnny | One of the common traits of great players is that everything has to be perfectly organized. I cannot stand looking at anything that isn’t orderly. |
| Miller, Johnny | Only one golfer in a thousand grips the club lightly enough. |
| Miller, Johnny | Serenity is knowing that your worst shot is still going to be pretty good. |
| Nicklaus, Jack | A perfectly straight shot with a big club is a fluke. |
| Nicklaus, Jack | I have always felt that the mettle of a player is not how well he plays when he’s playing well, but how well he scores and plays when he’s playing poorly. |
| Nicklaus, Jack | More golfers lose golf tournaments than win them. |
| Nicklaus, Jack | Tee up the ball high—air offers less resistance than dirt. |
| Nicklaus, Jack | You don’t win golf tournaments by hitting miraculous shots that you are not capable of hitting. You lose golf tournaments that way. |
| Norman, Greg | Happiness is a long walk with a putter in your hand. |
| Norman, Greg | When you’re playing poorly, you start thinking too much. That’s when you confuse yourself. |
| Palmer, Arnold | Don’t play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty. |
| Palmer, Arnold | Golf if deceptively simple yet endlessly complicated. |
| Palmer, Arnold | I never rooted against an opponent, but I never rooted for him either. |
| Palmer, Arnold | Match your strategy to your skills. |
| Palmer, Arnold | What other people may find in poetry, I find in the flight of a good drive. |
| Palmer, Arnold | Your worst putt will be as close as your best chip. |
| Penick, Harvey | In the golf swing a tiny change can make a huge difference. The natural inclination is to begin to overdo the tiny change that has brought success. So you exaggerate in an effort to improve even more, and soon you are lost and confused again. |
| Price, Nick | Solid contact with the ball is as important with your putter as it is with your five-iron. |
| Reston, James | Golf is a plague, invented by the Calvinistic Scots as a punishment for man’s sins. |
| Robertson, Lord | My favorite golf shots are the practice swing and the conceded putt—the rest can never be mastered. |
| Snead, Sam | Lay off for three weeks, and then quit for good. |
| Snead, Sam | You know those two-foot downhill putts with a break? I’d rather see a rattlesnake. |
| Thomson, Jimmy | Ben Hogan had three fairways—right, center, and left. The rest of us were lucky we had one. Hogan always hit a shot with the next shot in mind. |
| Trevino, Lee | Heck, I wish they’d make the gallery ropes out of bounds. We’re the only sport that plays in the audience. |
| Trevino, Lee | My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch. |
| Trevino, Lee | Remember Golf is a game invented by the same people who think music comes out of a bagpipe. |
| Trevino, Lee | You can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen. |
| Trevino, Lee | You never learn to play golf on a golf course—the place to learn how to play golf is on the practice range. |
| Twain, Mark | It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they’re still rolling. |
| Unknown | Golfer: “You’ve got to be the worst caddy in the world.” Caddy: “I don’t think so. That would be too much of a coincidence.” |
| Unknown | The easiest golf stroke is the fourth putt! |
| Unknown | The greatest golfers in the world have all been ex-duffers. |
| Unknown | To psych your opponent about to hole out: “I’d give you that putt if it wasn’t downhill.” |
| Vardon, Harry | When practicing, use the club that gives you the most trouble—not the one that gives you the most satisfaction. |
| Watson, Tom | A lot of guys who have never choked have never been in the position to do so. |
| Watson, Tom | I’d rather face a four-foot putt coming back than leave the ball short on the front lip. |
| Watson, Tom | The first thing you look at is the lie. The lie tells you what to do. |
| Williams, Ted | Golf is the only sport where the ball doesn’t move until you hit it. |
| Zoeller, Fuzzy | How did I four-putt? I missed the hole. I missed the hole. I missed the hole. I made it. |
Christian Quotations 