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Senior Golf: The Greatest Quotes About Golf

By Allen Pedersen

Golf is a sport that encourages creative expression and stirs emotions that connect with both players and fans.

From the calm beauty of a well-kept golf course at sunset to the exciting thrill of making a perfect shot, the game has a strong appeal that keeps us coming back. It can turn even the most hesitant player into an eager fan who appreciates the details of the game.

A simple search on Google for “golf quotes” shows a vast collection of wisdom and thoughts from famous golfers and great thinkers. Each quote captures the deep bond between the player and the course, reminding us of the unique mix of challenge, skill, and happiness that characterizes this classic sport.

Average time to read: 9 minutes, Senior Golf

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Here’s the list of the top 75 golf quotes of all time, presented in no particular order.

  • Anonymous
    “Golf can best be defined as an endless series of tragedies obscured by the occasional miracle.”
  • Bobby Jones
    “Golf is 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.”
  • Ben Hogan
    “The most important shot in golf is the next one.”
  • Greg Norman
    “Happiness is a long walk with a putter”
  • Jack Nicklaus
    “Don’t be too proud to take lessons. I’m not.”
  • Payne Stewart
    “A bad attitude is worse than a bad swing.”
  • Phil Mickelson
    “A great shot is when you pull it off. A smart shot is when you don’t have the guts to try it.”
  • Pete Dye
    “Life is not fair, so why should I make a course that is fair.”
  • Gary Player
    “The more I practice, the luckier I get.”
  • Lee Trevino
    “If you’re caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron.”
  • Chi Chi Rodriguez
    “Golf is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off.”
  • David Feherty
    “Watching Phil Mickelson play golf is like watching a drunk chasing a balloon near the edge of a cliff.”
  • Seve Ballesteros
    “I look into eyes, shake their hand, pat their back, and wish them luck, but I am thinking, I am going to bury you.”
  • Arnold Palmer
    “Success in golf depends less on strength of body than upon strength of mind and character.”
  • Raymond Floyd
    “They call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken.”
  • Pete Dye
    “The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.”
  • Ben Crenshaw
    “Golf is the hardest game in the world. There is no way you can ever get it. Just when you think you do, the game jumps up and puts you in your place.”
  • Jack Nicklaus
    “Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.”
  • Billy Graham
    “The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.”
  • Harry Vardon
    “Don’t play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty.”
  • Nick Faldo
    “Tempo is the glue that sticks all elements of the golf swing together.”
  • John Updike
    “Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golfers become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.”
  • Fuzzy Zoeller
    “You’ve got to have the guts not to be afraid to screw up.”
  • Lee Trevino
    “My swing is so bad, I look like a caveman killing his lunch.”

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  • Jim Bishop
    “Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.”
  • Winston Churchill
    “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.”
  • David Feherty
    “It’s how you deal with failure that determines how you achieve success.”
  • Bobby Jones
    “I never learned anything from a match that I won.”
  • Harvey Penick
    “Golf tips are like Aspirin: One may do you good, but if you swallow the whole bottle you’ll be lucky to survive.”
  • Arnold Palmer
    “Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.”
  • Percey Boomer
    “If you wish to hide your character, do not play golf.”
  • Heywood Hale Broun
    “Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists. By its exactitude’s of measurements, it invites the attention of perfectionists.”
  • John Updike
    “The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.”
  • Arnold Palmer
    “What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.”
  • Sam Snead
    “If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they’d starve to death.”
  • Horace G. Hutchinson
    “If profanity had an influence on the flight of the ball, the game of golf would be played far better than it is.”
  • Payne Stewart
    “I don’t think it’s healthy to take yourself too seriously.”
  • Harvey Penick
    “The woods are full of long drivers.”
  • Tiger Woods
    “No matter how good you get, you can always get better — and that’s the exciting part.”
  • Mark Twain
    “Golf is a good walk spoiled”
  • Sam Snead
    “Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.”
  • Bobby Jones
    “The secret of golf is to turn three shots into two.”
  • Lee Trevino
    “You don’t know what pressure is until you play for five bucks with only two bucks in your pocket.”
  • Harry Vardon
    “For this game you need, above all things, to be in a tranquil frame of mind.”
  • Jim Bishop
    “Mulligan: invented by an Irishman who wanted to hit one more twenty yard grounder.”
  • Arnold Palmer
    “Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.”
  • Lloyd Mangrum
    “Golf is the only sport I know of where a player pays for every mistake. A man can muff a serve in tennis, miss a strike in baseball, or throw an incomplete pass in football and still have another chance to square himself. In golf, every swing counts against you.”
  • Ben Hogan
    “I have found the game to be, in all factualness, a universal language wherever I traveled at home or abroad.”
  • Sam Snead
    “Nobody asked how you looked, just what you shot.”
  • Hale Irwin
    “Golf is the loneliest sport. You’re completely alone with every conceivable opportunity to defeat yourself. Golf brings out your assets and liabilities as a person. The longer you play, the more certain you are that a man’s performance is the outward manifestation of who, in his heart, he really thinks he is.”
  • Bobby Jones
    “A leading difficulty with the average player is that he totally misunderstands what is meant by concentration. He may think he is concentrating hard when he is merely worrying.”
  • Gay Brewer
    “Golf is a game you can never get too good at. You can improve, but you can never get to where you master the game.”
  • Peter Jacobsen
    “One of the most fascinating things about golf is how it reflects the cycle of life. No matter what you shoot – the next day you have to go back to the first tee and begin all over again and make yourself into something.”
  • Tommy Bolt
    “The mind messes up more shots than the body.”
  • Jack Nicklaus
    “When you lip out several putts in a row, you should never think that means that you’re putting well. When you’re putting well, the only question is what part of the hole it’s going to fall in, not if it’s going in.”
  • Jimmy Demaret
    “You know what they say about big hitters…the woods are full of them.”
  • Henry Cotton
    “Every shot counts. The three-foot putt is as important as the 300-yard drive.”
  • Harry Vardon
    “Never concede the putt that beats you.”
  • Dr. Bob Rotella
    “Golf is about how well you accept, respond to, and score with your misses much more so than it is a game of your perfect shots.”
  • Lee Trevino
    “Putts get real difficult the day they hand out the money.”
  • Sam Snead
    “Forget your opponents; always play against par.”
  • Jack Nicklaus
    “A perfectly straight shot with a big club is a fluke.”
  • Ben Hogan
    “A shot that goes in the cup is pure luck, but a shot to within two feet of the flag is skill.”
  • Bobby Jones
    “You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.”
  • Ben Hogan
    “There are no shortcuts on the quest for perfection.”
  • Bruce Crampton
    “Golf is a compromise between what your ego wants you to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”
  • Alice Cooper
    “Mistakes are part of the game. It’s how well you recover from them, that’s the mark of a great player.”
  • P.G. Wodehouse
    “Golf… is the infallible test. The man who can go into a patch of rough alone, with the knowledge that only God is watching him, and play his ball where it lies, is the man who will serve you faithfully and well.”
  • Hank Aaron
    “It took me seventeen years to get three thousand hits in baseball. It took one afternoon on the golf course.”
  • Angelo Spagnolo
    “I don’t let birdies and pars get in the way of having a good time”
  • Dave Berry
    “Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it’s open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.”
  • James Barrett Reston
    “Golf: A plague invented by the Calvinistic Scots as a punishment for man’s sins.”
  • G.K. Chesterton
    “I regard golf as an expensive way of playing marbles.”
  • P.G. Wodehouse
    “Golf, like measles, should be caught young.”
  • H.G. Wells
    “The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.”

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