Golf Quotes

Here are some great golf quotes for the seasoned pro, the casual weekend golfer, and everyone in between.

As you peruse this great collection, your mind will think of some of your best shots from past days on the links. Enjoy these insights, and remember, no mulligans!

Best Golf Quotes

1.) A “gimme” can best be defined as an agreement between two golfers, neither of whom can putt very well.
Unknown

2.) Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent is, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.
Jack Nicklaus

3.) Golf is a game where the ball always lies poorly, and the player always lies well.
Unknown

4.) Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening – and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.
Arnold Palmer

5.) Many a golfer prefer a golf cart to a caddy because the cart cannot count, criticize, or laugh.
Unknown

6.) Golf is a lot of walking, broken up by disappointment and bad arithmetic.
Unknown

7.) Gone to the course — be back dark-thirty.
Unknown

8.) Born to golf. Forced to work.
Unknown

Browse a collection of funny golf jokes worth sharing.

Good Golf Quotations

9.) Success in this game depends less on strength of body than strength of mind and character.
Arnold Palmer

10.) A golfer’s diet: live on greens as much as possible.
Unknown

11.) 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.
Dr. Bob Rotella

12.) The greatest single lesson to be learned from golf is mental discipline.
Louise Suggs

13.) The best wood in most amateurs’ bags is a pencil.
Unknown

14.) I have to believe in myself. I know what I can do, what I can achieve.
Sergio Garcia

16.) I’ve spent most of my life golfing – the rest I’ve just wasted.
Unknown

17.) When I die, bury me on the course so my husband will visit.
Unknown

18.) A game in which you claim the privileges of age and retain the playthings of childhood.
Unknown

Great Sayings About Golf

19.) To some, the greatest handicap is the ability to add correctly.
Unknown

20.) It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
Hank Aaron

21.) I had a wonderful experience on the golf course today. I had a hole in nothing. Missed the ball and sank the divot.
Don Adams

22.) There is one thing in this world that is dumber than playing golf. That is watching someone else playing golf. What do you actually get to see? Thirty-seven guys in polyester slacks squinting at the sun. Doesn’t that set your blood racing?
Peter Andrews

23.) One thing about golf is you don’t know why you play bad and why you play good.
George Archer

24.) To give yourself the best possible chance of playing to your potential, you must prepare for every eventuality. That means practice.
Seve Ballesteros

25.) Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it.
Ernie Banks

27.) When your shot has to carry over a water hazard, you can either hit one more club or two more balls.
Henry Beard

28.) Duffers who consistently shank their balls are urged to buy and study Shanks – No Thanks by R.K. Hoffman or, in extreme cases, M.S. Howard’s excellent Tennis for Beginners.
Henry Beard

Pro tip: Some of these golf quotes make nice photo captions for Facebook and Instagram.

Words of Wisdom

29.) “Play it as it lies” is one of the fundamental dictates of golf. The other is “Wear it if it clashes.”
Henry Beard

30.) Give me golf clubs, fresh air, and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.
Jack Benny

31.) The more you play it, the less you know about it.
Patty Berg

32.) Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.
Jim Bishop

33.) Golf isn’t like other sports where you can take a player out if he’s having a bad day. You have to play the whole game.
Phil Blackmar

34.) Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?
Al Boliska

35.) Never break your putter and your driver in the same round, or you’re dead.
Tommy Bolt

36.) I may be the only golfer never to have broken a single putter if you don’t count the one I twisted into a loop and threw into a bush.
Thomas Boswell

37.) I don’t like to watch golf on television because I can’t stand people who whisper.
David Brenner

38.) The trouble that most of us find with the modern matched sets of clubs is that they don’t really seem to know any more about the game than the old ones did.
Robert Browning

Check out Guide to Mini Golf.

Funny Golf Quotes

39.) You know you’re on the Senior Tour when your back goes out more than you do.
Bob BruceH

40.) One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.
Don Carter

41.) 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.
Winston Churchill

42.) Missing a short putt does not mean you have to hit your next drive out of bounds.
Henry Cotton

43.) As far as swing and techniques are concerned, I don’t know diddly squat. When I’m playing well, I don’t even take aim.
Fred Couples

44.) I’m about five inches from being an outstanding golfer. That’s the distance my left ear is from my right.
Ben Crenshaw

45.) 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.
Ben Crenshaw

46.) I can airmail the golf ball, but sometimes I don’t put the right address on it.
Jim Dent

18 Holes

47.) Luck? Sure, but only after long practice and only with the ability to think under pressure.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias

48.) The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can’t see him laughing.
Phyllis Diller

49.) Half of golf is fun; the other half is putting.
Peter Dobereiner

50.) The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.
Pete Dye

51.) Playing the game, I have learned the meaning of humility. It has given me an understanding of the futility of the human effort.
Abba Eban

52.) They call it golf because all of the other four-letter words were taken.
Raymond Floyd

53.) I would like to deny all allegations by Bob Hope that during my last game of golf, I hit an eagle, a birdie, an elk, and a moose.
Gerald Ford

Motivational Golf Quotes

54.) I know I am getting better at golf because I’m hitting fewer spectators.
Gerald Ford

55.) I tried real hard to play golf, and I was so bad at it they would have to check me for ticks at the end of the round because I’d spent about half the day in the woods.
Jeff Foxworthy

56.) The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.
Billy Graham

57.) When you hear someone shout “You da man,” if he ain’t shouting at Arnold Palmer, then it ain’t da man.
Ron Green

58.) Golf is a game in which you yell “fore,” shoot six and write down five.
Paul Harvey

59.) 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.
Bruce Crampton

60.) The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
Ernest Hemingway

61.) 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.
Peter Jacobsen

62.) Golf is not, on the whole, a game for realists. By its exactitudes of measurements, it invites the attention of perfectionists.
Heywood Hale Broun

Ben Hogan Quotes

63.) The most important shot in golf is the next one.

64.) Reverse every natural instinct and do the opposite of what you are inclined to do, and you will probably come very close to having a perfect golf swing.

65.) May thy ball lie in green pastures and not in still waters.

66.) The only thing a golfer needs is more daylight.

67.) There is no similarity between golf and putting; they are two different games, one played in the air, and the other on the ground.

68.) Golf is 20 percent talent and 80 percent management.

69.) This is a game of misses. The guy who misses the best is going to win.

70.) As you walk down the fairway of life, you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.

Bob Hope’s Sayings on Golf

71.) I went to play golf and tried to shoot my age, but I shot my weight instead.

72.) If I’m on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast. If God wants to play through, let him.

73.) I’ll shoot my age if I have to live to be 105.

Bobby Jones Quotes

74.) No one ever swung too slowly.

75.) Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots – but you have to play the ball where it lies.

76.) Golf is the only game I know of that actually becomes harder the longer you play it.

77.) You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.

78.) I never learned anything from a match that I won.

Golfing Quotations

79.) One hundred years of experience had demonstrated that the game is temporary insanity practiced in a pasture.
Dave Kindred

80.) Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and you’ve found a man about to make a difficult putt.
Fletcher Knebel

81.) Talking to a golf ball won’t do you any good unless you do it while your opponent is teeing off.
Bruce Lansky

82.) The best advice I can give for playing a ball out of water is – don’t.
Tony Lema

83.) If you think it’s hard to meet new people, try picking up the wrong golf ball.
Jack Lemmon

84.) I play in the low 80s. If it’s any hotter than that, I won’t play.
Joe E. Lewis

Notable

85.) If you call on God to improve the results of a shot while it is still in motion, you are using “an outside agency” and subject to appropriate penalties under the rules of golf.
Henry Longhurst

86.) A routine is not a routine if you have to think about it.
Davis Love, Jr.

87.) When it’s breezy, hit it easy.
Davis Love, Jr.

88.) It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place in this world is when one is playing golf.
Robert Lynd

89.) The only sure rule in golf is – he who has the fastest cart never has to play the bad lie.
Mickey Mantle

90.) Golf’s three ugliest words: still your shot.
Dave Marr

91.) It’s so ridiculous to see a golfer with a one-foot putt and everybody is saying “Shhh” and not moving a muscle. Then we allow nineteen-year-old kids to face a game-deciding free throw with seventeen thousand people yelling.
Al McGuire

92.) Concentrate on hitting the green. The cup will come to you.
Cary Middlecoff

93.) Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.
A.A. Milne

Memorable Golf Quotes

94.) If you really want to get better at golf, go back and take it up at a much earlier age.
Unknown

95.) Golf without mistakes is like watching haircuts.
Jim Murray – More Jim Murray Quotations.

96.) The only thing you should force in a golf swing is the club back in the bag.
Byron Nelson

97.) Nothing goes down slower than a golf handicap.
Bobby Nichols

98.) One minute, you’re bleeding. The next minute you’re hemorrhaging. The next minute you’re painting the Mona Lisa.
Mac O’Grady

99.) Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.
P.J. O’Rourke

Jack Nicklaus’s golf quotes

100.) Through years of experience, I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.
On why he tees his ball high.

101.) Professional golf is the only sport where, if you win 20% of the time, you’re the best. It takes hundreds of good golf shots to gain confidence, but only one bad one to lose it.

102.) Golf is a better game played downhill.

103.) A kid grows up a lot faster on the course. Golf teaches you how to behave.

Arnold Palmer’s Golf Quotes

104.) I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game. It is called an eraser.

105.) What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

106.) I’ve always made a total effort, even when the odds seemed entirely against me. I never quit trying; I never felt that I didn’t have a chance to win.

107.) Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.

108.) The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.

109.) It’s a funny thing; the more I practice, the luckier I get.

Awesome Golf Sayings

110.) Golf is the most useless outdoor game ever devised to waste the time and try the spirit of man.
Westbrook Pegler

111.) The woods are full of long drivers.
Harvey Penick

112.) Real golfers, no matter what the provocation, never strike a caddie with the driver. The sand wedge is far more effective.
Huxtable Pippy

113.) If you think your hands are more important in your golf swing than your legs, try walking a hole on your hands.
Gary Player

114.) Golf is a puzzle without an answer. I’ve played the game for 40 years, and I still haven’t the slightest idea of how to play.
Gary Player

115.) Golf is the cruelest game because, eventually, it will drag you out in front of the whole school, take your lunch money and slap you around.
Rick Reilly

116.) Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 percent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness, and conversation.
Grantland Rice

117.) You are meant to play the ball as it lies, a fact that may help to touch on your own objective approach to life.
Grantland Rice

118.) Golf gives you an insight into human nature, your own, as well as your opponent’s.
Grantland Rice

119.) My favorite shots are the practice swing and the conceded putt. The rest can never be mastered.
Lord Robertson

Chi Chi Rodriguez Quotes

120.) A golf ball is like a clock. Always hit it at 6 o’clock and make it go toward 12 o’clock. But make sure you’re in the same time zone.
Chi Chi Rodriguez

121.) After all these years, it’s still embarrassing for me to play on the American golf tour. Like the time I asked my caddie for a sand wedge, and he came back ten minutes later with a ham on rye.

122.) Golf is the only sport that a professional can enjoy playing with his friends.

123.) I don’t exaggerate — I just remember big.

124.) I don’t fear death, but I sure don’t like those three-footers for par.

125.) I never pray to God to make a putt. I pray to God to help me react good if I miss a putt.

Really Funny Golf Quotes

126.) The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.
Will Rogers

127.) I guess there is nothing that will get your mind off everything like golf. I have never been depressed enough to take up the game, but they say you get so sore at yourself you forget to hate your enemies.
Will Rogers

128.) Golf is a game in which the ball lies poorly and the players well.
Art Rosenbaum

129.) A passion, an obsession, a romance, a nice acquaintanceship with trees, sand, and water.
Bob Ryan

130.) You can’t call it a sport. You don’t run, jump, you don’t shoot, you don’t pass. All you have to do is buy some clothes that don’t match.
Steve Sax

131.) A golf course outside a big town serves an excellent purpose in that it segregates, as though a concentration camp, all the idle and idiot well-to-do.
Osbert Sitwell

132.) It’s so bad I could putt off a tabletop and still leave the ball halfway down the leg.
J.C. Snead

Sam Snead Golf Quotes

133.) Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.

134.) If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they’d starve to death.

135.) Forget your opponents; always play against par.

136.) These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.

137.) Practice puts brains in your muscles.

138.) You can’t go into a shop and buy a good game of golf.

139.) If some players took a fork to their mouths the way they take the club back, they’d starve to death.

140.) There are no short hitters on the tour anymore – just long and unbelievably long.

141.) These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.

Famous Golf Quotes

142.) Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, and some on golf courses.
Adlai Stevenson

143.) When the ducks are walking, you know it is too windy to be playing golf.
Dave Stockton

144.) My golf is improving. Yesterday I hit the ball in one!
Jane Swan

145.) I’m hitting the woods just great, but I’m having a terrible time getting out of them.
Harry Toscano

Lee Trevino Quotations

146.) There are two things you can do with your head downplay golf and pray.

147.) 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.

148.) Columbus went around the world in 1492. That isn’t a lot of strokes when you consider the course.

150.) I’m not saying my golf game went bad, but if I grew tomatoes, they’d come up sliced.

151.) Real pressure in golf is playing for $10 when you’ve only got $5 in your pocket.

152.) You can talk to a fade, but a hook won’t listen.

153.) My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.

154.) There is no such thing as natural touch. Touch is something you create by hitting millions of golf balls.

Literary Golf Quotes

155.) Golf appeals to the idiot in us and the child. Just how childlike golf players become is proven by their frequent inability to count past five.
John Updike

156.) Don’t play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty.
Harry Vardon

157.) If your opponent is playing several shots in vain attempts to extricate himself from a bunker, do not stand near him and audibly count his strokes. It would be justifiable homicide if he wound up his pitiable exhibition by applying his niblick to your head.
Harry Vardon

158.) Art said he wanted to get more distance. I told him to hit it and run backward.
Ken Venturi, on Art Rosenbaum

159.) The ball retriever is not long enough to get my putter out of the tree.
Brian Weis

160.) The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.
H.G. Wells

161.) Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.
Woodrow Wilson

162.) The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
P.G. Wodehouse

163.) Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.
P.G. Wodehouse

164.) If you are going to throw a club, it is important to throw it ahead of you, down the fairway, so you don’t have to waste energy going back to pick it up.
Tommy Bolt

See our Sports Quotes for insights into the games.

Fore! Golf Sayings

165.) My dad has always taught me these words: care and share. That’s why we put on clinics. The only thing I can do is try to give back. If it works, it works.
Tiger Woods

166.) I want to be what I’ve always wanted to be: dominant.
Tiger Woods — See Best Tiger Woods Quotes.

167.) Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
William Wordsworth

168.) Keep your sense of humor. There’s enough stress in the rest of your life not to let bad shots ruin a game you’re supposed to enjoy.
Amy Alcott

169.) It’s good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling.
Mark Twain

170.) Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Mark Twain

171.) A good golfer has the determination to win and the patience to wait for the breaks.
Gary Player

172.) The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
John Updike

173.) Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening – and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.
Arnold Palmer

Short Golf Quotes

Note: You can also use any of the fun golf quotes above as captions.

174.) May the course be with you.

175.) Grip it and rip it.

176.) Playing good; scoring bad.

177.) I have callouses on my hand from the sand trap rake.

178.) Up to par.

179.) Weedwhacker.

180.) Don’t text and drive.

181.) Prettiest caddy in the world!

182.) Time to par-tee!

183.) Life, liberty, and the pursuit of golf balls.

184.) I golf in the mid-70s. Any colder, I stay home.

185.) You had me at golf.

186.) Let’s go clubbing.

187.) Iron Man.

188.) Born to golf, forced to work.

Funny Golf Captions

189.) Legalize Mulligans!

190.) I’m just here for the 19th hole.

191.) Putt, putt, and away!

192.) A good walk spoiled.

193.) Less golf, said no one ever.

194.) Talk birdie to me.

195.) Big hitter, the Lama.

196.) It’s tee time somewhere in the world.

197.) World’s most okay golfer.

198.) The Golf Father.

199.) Golf hair – Don’t care!

200.) This game suits me to a tee.

201.) Love the Club Scene.

202.) Best golfer by par.

203.) Bye-bye birdie.

204.) My best club is the scoring pencil.

205.) Drive Responsibly.

Extra Round

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