Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court

The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Never make excuses. Your friends don't need them and your foes won't believe them.

Discipline yourself and others won't need to.

Don't let making a living prevent you from making a life.

Being a role model is the most powerful form of educating...too often fathers neglect it because they get so caught up in making a living they forget to make a life.

If we magnified blessings as much as we magnify disappointments, we would all be much happier.

Tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember a story.

Being average means you are as close to the bottom as you are to the top.

Although there is no progress without change, not all change is progress.

If I were ever prosecuted for my religion, I truly hope there would be enough evidence to convict me.

The man who is afraid to risk failure seldom has to face success.

We are many, but are we much?

Failure is not Fatal, but Failure to CHANGE can be.

it is important to understand the purpose of criticism. Criticism is not meant to punish, but rather to correct something that is preventing better results. The only goal of criticism or discipline is improvement. You must keep that in mind and try to the best of your ability to use tact.

Did I win? Did I lose? Those are the wrong questions. The correct question is: Did I make my best effort? That’s what matters. The rest of it just gets in the way.

The goal in life is just the same as in basketball: make the effort to do the best you are capable of doing

I wanted to win every single game I ever played in or coached. Absolutely. I wanted to win. But, I understood that ultimately the winning or losing may not be under my control. What was under my control was how I prepared myself and our team. I judged my success, my “winning,” on that. It just made more sense.

If a player appeared to be taking it easy in practice, I told him, "Don't think you can make up for it by working twice as hard tomorrow. If you have it within your power to work twice as hard, why aren't you doing it now?

Perfection is what you are striving for, but perfection is an impossibility. However, striving for perfection is not an impossibility. Do the best you can under the conditions that exist. That is what counts.

The locker rooms were clean when we departed because I asked the players to pick up after themselves. I believe this is just common courtesy. Somebody’s going to have to clean it up, and I see no reason why it shouldn’t be the person who messed it up.

Competitiveness must be focused exclusively on the process of what you are doing rather than the result of that effort (the so-called winning or losing).

It took me a long time to understand that even a stubborn mule responds to gentleness.

Abraham Lincoln. He once said that the best thing a man can do for his children is to love their mother.

I am not what I ought to be, Not what I want to be, Not what I am going to be, But I am thankful that I am better than I used to be. It

I believe in the basics: attention to, and perfection of, tiny details that might be commonly overlooked. They may seem trivial, perhaps even laughable to those who don’t understand, but they aren’t. They are fundamental to your progress in basketball, business, and life. They are the difference between champions and near champions. For example, at the first squad meeting each season, held two weeks before our first actual practice, I personally demonstrated how I wanted players to put on their socks each and every time: Carefully roll the socks down over the toes, ball of the foot, arch and around the heel, then pull the sock up snug so there will be no wrinkles of any kind.

Trusting is part of our higher nature. Doubting is a lower instinct. The latter is easy to do, the former more difficult—but so much more rewarding.