Golf quotes for the seasoned pro, the casual weekend golfer and everyone in between. As you peruse this great collection, your mind will be thinking of some of your best shots from past days on the links. Enjoy these insights and remember, no mulligans!
Table Of Contents
Best Golf Quotes
- A “gimme” can best be defined as an agreement between two golfers, neither of whom can putt very well.
Author Unknown - Golf is a game where the ball always lies poorly and the player always lies well.
Author Unknown - Many a golfer prefers a golf cart to a caddy because the cart cannot count, criticize or laugh.
Author Unknown - Golf is a lot of walking, broken up by disappointment and bad arithmetic.
Author Unknown - Gone to the course — be back dark thirty.
Author Unknown - Born to golf. Forced to work.
Author Unknown
Good Golf Quotations
- A golfer’s diet: live on greens as much as possible.
Unknown - The best wood in most amateurs’ bags is a pencil.
Unknown - I’ve spent most of my life golfing – the rest I’ve just wasted.
Unknown - When I die, bury me on the course so my husband will visit.
Unknown - A game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
Unknown - A game in which you claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.
Unknown
Great Sayings About Golf
- To some, the greatest handicap is the ability to add correctly.
Unknown - It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits. I did it in one afternoon on the golf course.
Hank Aaron - 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 - 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 - One thing about golf is you don’t know why you play bad and why you play good.
George Archer
- To give yourself the best possible chance of playing to your potential, you must prepare for every eventuality. That means practice.
Seve Ballesteros - Baseball reveals character; golf exposes it.
Ernie Banks - When your shot has to carry over a water hazard, you can either hit one more club or two more balls.
Henry Beard - 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
TiP: Some of these golf quotes make nice photo captions for Facebook and Instagram.
Words of Wisdom
- “Play it as it lies” is one of the fundamental dictates of golf. The other is “Wear it if it clashes.”
Henry Beard - Give me golf clubs, fresh air, and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.
Jack Benny - The more you play it the less you know about it.
Patty Berg - Golf is played by twenty million, mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.
Jim Bishop - 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 - Have you ever noticed what golf spells backwards?
Al Boliska - Never break your putter and your driver in the same round or you’re dead.
Tommy Bolt - 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 - I don’t like to watch golf on television because I can’t stand people who whisper.
David Brenner - 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 Sayings
- You know you’re on the Senior Tour when your back goes out more than you do.
Bob Bruce - One of the advantages bowling has over golf is that you seldom lose a bowling ball.
Don Carter - 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 - Missing a short putt does not mean you have to hit your next drive out of bounds.
Henry Cotton - 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 - I’m about five inches from being an outstanding golfer. That’s the distance my left ear is from my right.
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.
Ben Crenshaw - I can airmail the golf ball, but sometimes I don’t put the right address on it.
Jim Dent
18 Holes
- Luck? Sure, but only after long practice and only with the ability to think under pressure.
Babe Didrikson Zaharias - The reason the pro tells you to keep your head down is so you can’t see him laughing.
Phyllis Diller - Half of golf is fun; the other half is putting.
Peter Dobereiner - The ardent golfer would play Mount Everest if somebody put a flagstick on top.
Pete Dye - 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 - They call it golf because all of the other four-letter words were taken.
Raymond Floyd - 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
- I know I am getting better at golf because I’m hitting fewer spectators.
Gerald Ford - 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 - The only time my prayers are never answered is on the golf course.
Billy Graham - When you hear someone shout “You da man,” if he ain’t shouting at Arnold Palmer, then it ain’t da man.
Ron Green - Golf is a game in which you yell “fore,” shoot six and write down five.
Paul Harvey - The game of golf would lose a great deal if croquet mallets and billiard cues were allowed on the putting green.
Ernest Hemingway - 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
Ben Hogan Quotes
- The most important shot in golf is the next one.
- 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.
- May thy ball lie in green pastures, and not in still waters.
- The only thing a golfer needs is more daylight.
- There is no similarity between golf and putting; they are two different games, one played in the air, and the other on the ground.
- Golf is 20 percent talent and 80 percent management.
- This is a game of misses. The guy who misses the best is going to win.
Bob Hope Sayings on the Game
- I went to play golf and tried to shoot my age, but I shot my weight instead.
Bob Hope - If I’m on the course and lightning starts, I get inside fast. If God wants to play through, let him.
Bob Hope - I’ll shoot my age if I have to live to be 105.
Bob Hope
Bobby Jones Quotes
- No one ever swung too slowly.
- 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.
- Golf is the only game I know of that actually becomes harder the longer you play it.
- You swing your best when you have the fewest things to think about.
- I never learned anything from a match that I won.
Golfing Quotations
- One hundred years of experience had demonstrated that the game is temporary insanity practiced in a pasture.
Dave Kindred - Find a man with both feet firmly on the ground and you’ve found a man about to make a difficult putt.
Fletcher Knebel - Talking to a golf ball won’t do you any good unless you do it while your opponent is teeing off.
Bruce Lansky - The best advice I can give for playing a ball out of water is – don’t.
Tony Lema - If you think it’s hard to meet new people, try picking up the wrong golf ball.
Jack Lemmon - I play in the low 80s. If it’s any hotter than that, I won’t play.
Joe E. Lewis
Notable
- 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 - A routine is not a routine if you have to think about it.
Davis Love, Jr. - When it’s breezy, hit it easy.
Davis Love, Jr. - It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place in this world is when one is playing golf.
Robert Lynd - The only sure rule in golf is – he who has the fastest cart never has to play the bad lie.
Mickey Mantle - Golf’s three ugliest words: still your shot.
Dave Marr - 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 - Concentrate on hitting the green. The cup will come to you.
Cary Middlecoff - Golf is so popular simply because it is the best game in the world at which to be bad.
A.A. Milne - If you really want to get better at golf, go back and take it up at a much earlier age.
Thomas Mulligan - Golf without mistakes is like watching haircuts. A dinner without wine.
Jim Murray – More Jim Murray Quotations. - The only thing you should force in a golf swing is the club back in the bag.
Byron Nelson - Nothing goes down slower than a golf handicap.
Bobby Nichols - One minute you’re bleeding. The next minute you’re hemorrhaging. The next minute you’re painting the Mona Lisa.
Mac O’Grady - Golf combines two favorite American pastimes: taking long walks and hitting things with a stick.
P.J. O’Rourke
Jack Nicklaus quotes
- Through years of experience, I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.
Jack Nicklaus, on why he tees his ball high - 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.
- Golf is a better game played downhill.
- A kid grows up a lot faster on the course. Golf teaches you how to behave.
Arnold Palmer Quotes
- I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game. It is called an eraser.
- What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.
- 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.
- Concentration comes out of a combination of confidence and hunger.
- The most rewarding things you do in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
- It’s a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.
Awesome Golf Sayings
- Golf is the most useless outdoor game ever devised to waste the time and try the spirit of man.
Westbrook Pegler - The woods are full of long drivers.
Harvey Penick - Real golfers, no matter what the provocation, never strike a caddie with the driver. The sand wedge is far more effective.
Huxtable Pippey - If you think your hands are more important in your golf swing than your legs, try walking a hole on your hands.
Gary Player - 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 - 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 - Golf is 20 percent mechanics and technique. The other 80 percent is philosophy, humor, tragedy, romance, melodrama, companionship, camaraderie, cussedness and conversation.
Grantland Rice - 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 - Golf gives you an insight into human nature, your own, as well as your opponent’s.
Grantland Rice - My favorite shots are the practice swing and the conceded putt. The rest can never be mastered.
Lord Robertson
Humorous Words
- 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 - 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.
Chi Chi Rodriguez - Golf is the only sport that a professional can enjoy playing with his friends.
Chi Chi Rodriguez - I don’t exaggerate — I just remember big.
Chi Chi Rodriguez - I don’t fear death, but I sure don’t like those three-footers for par.
Chi Chi Rodriguez - I never pray to God to make a putt. I pray to God to help me react good if I miss a putt.
Chi Chi Rodriguez
More Funny Sayings
- The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.
Will Rogers - 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 - Golf is a game in which the ball lies poorly and the players well.
Art Rosenbaum - A passion, an obsession, a romance, a nice acquaintanceship with trees, sand, and water.
Bob Ryan - 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 - 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 - It’s so bad I could putt off a tabletop and still leave the ball halfway down the leg.
J.C. Snead
Sam Snead
- Of all the hazards, fear is the worst.
Sam Snead - If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they’d starve to death.
Sam Snead - Forget your opponents; always play against par.
Sam Snead - These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.
Sam Snead - Practice puts brains in your muscles.
Sam Snead - You can’t go into a shop and buy a good game of golf.
Sam Snead - If some players took a fork to their mouths the way they take the club back, they’d starve to death.
Sam Snead - There are no short hitters on the tour anymore – just long and unbelievably long.
Sam Snead - These greens are so fast I have to hold my putter over the ball and hit it with the shadow.
Sam Snead - Keep a close count of your nickels and dimes, stay away from whiskey, and never concede a putt.
Sam Snead
Famous
- Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses.
Adlai Stevenson - When the ducks are walking, you know it is too windy to be playing golf.
Dave Stockton - My golf is improving. Yesterday I hit the ball in one!
Jane Swan - I’m hitting the woods just great, but I’m having a terrible time getting out of them.
Harry Toscano
Lee Trevino Quotations
- There are two things you can do with your head downplay golf and pray.
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.
Lee Trevino - Columbus went around the world in 1492. That isn’t a lot of strokes when you consider the course.
Lee Trevino - I’m not saying my golf game went bad, but if I grew tomatoes, they’d come up sliced.
Lee Trevino - Real pressure in golf is playing for $10 when you’ve only got $5 in your pocket.
Lee Trevino - You can talk to a fade but a hook won’t listen.
Lee Trevino - My swing is so bad I look like a caveman killing his lunch.
Lee Trevino - There is no such thing as natural touch. Touch is something you create by hitting millions of golf balls.
Lee Trevino
Literary Golf Quotes
- 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 - Don’t play too much golf. Two rounds a day are plenty.
Harry Vardon - 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 - Art said he wanted to get more distance. I told him to hit it and run backward.
Ken Venturi, on Art Rosenbaum - The ball retriever is not long enough to get my putter out of the tree.
Brian Weis - The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf. It’s almost a law.
H.G. Wells - Golf is an ineffectual attempt to put an elusive ball into an obscure hole with implements ill-adapted to the purpose.
Woodrow Wilson - 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 - Golf, like the measles, should be caught young, for, if postponed to riper years, the results may be serious.
P.G. Wodehouse
Fore! Golf Sayings
- 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 - I want to be what I’ve always wanted to be: dominant.
Tiger Woods - Golf is a day spent in a round of strenuous idleness.
William Wordsworth - It’s good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling.
Mark Twain - Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Mark Twain - The golf swing is like a suitcase into which we are trying to pack one too many things.
John Updike
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