Shoe Dog: A Memoir By The Creator Of Nike Quotes
"The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas."
"Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why."
"It's not just that there's no finish line; it's that you define the finish line."
"Why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?"
"I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run."
"A pioneer spirit was discovered along that trail, some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism."
"What a beautiful place to be from, calm, green, tranquil."
"The best teacher I ever had spoke of our trail often. It's our birthright, he'd growl."
"The problem was, how to get to California? I certainly couldn’t afford airfare."
"People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition."
"You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past."
"She was certainly the only person I’d ever known who could casually drop Babe Paley and Hermann Hesse into the same conversation."
"I thought it was fitting, and telling, and hopeful, that White would use that word—'fan.'"
"To have cash balances sitting around doing nothing made no sense to me."
"I was absentminded, that I would drive to the grocery store and come home empty-handed."
"You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you."
"I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die."
"But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some."
"My only hope was that this distributor on the East Coast was lying."
"I tried to focus on the good. There was no firm plan."
"If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play."
"I got into the habit of running six miles every night after work."
"We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive."
"What’s the point in going slow—ever. Go fast or die."
"He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe."
"A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways as they’re capable of understanding."
"Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity."
"The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us."
"Sometimes I believe that I did. But in the end I don’t really know what led me to my decision. Luck? Instinct? Some inner spirit?"
"It’s time we faced facts: If we’re going to succeed, or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas—our own brand."
"Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes."
"It’s one thing to watch a sporting event and put yourself in the players’ shoes. Every fan does that. It’s another thing when the athletes are actually in your shoes."
"Somebody may beat me—but they're going to have to bleed to do it."
"I shake hands many times with Mr. Steve Prefontaine. I shake hands with Mr. Bill Bowerman."
"Fear of failure will never be our downfall as a company."
"We were trying to create a brand, but also a culture."
"It's hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born."
"Hasn’t your life been a kind of search for connection?"
"Going public could turn us overnight into the thing we loathed, the thing we’d spent our lives running from."
"I’d always try to find the time and energy to tell Matthew his bedtime story."
"It's almost over. Just hang on. Just a little longer."
"Give me something I can study. Give me a breakdown of your case."
"This whole case is nothing but the result of a dirty trick played by our competitors."
"If Nike was forced to pay this exorbitant sum of money, it would put us out of business."
"He was totally honest, a radical tactic in any negotiation."
"Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius."
"Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it."
"Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no."
"The human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims."
"Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity."
"You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you."
"For some, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood."
"The youngest employees at Nike... clamor for the old tales."
"In the timeless, clarifying light of that moon, I begin to make a list."