Pat Riley Quotes

There are only two options regarding commitment; you’re either in or you’re out.

A champion needs a motivation above and beyond winning.

You have to defeat a great players aura more than his game.

Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.

Shoulda, coulda, and woulda won't get it done. In attacking adversity, only a positive attitude, alertness, and regrouping to basics can launch a comeback.

Excellence happens when you try each day to both do and be, a little better than you were yesterday!

The key to teamwork is to learn a role, accept a role, and strive to become excellent playing it.

Don't let other people tell you what you want.

Being ready isn't enough; you have to be prepared for a promotion or any other significant change.

The Ten Commandments were not a suggestion.

Coaches who let a championship team back off from becoming a dynasty are cowards.

You have no choices about how you lose, but you do have a choice about how you come back and prepare to win again.

There's always the motivation of wanting to win. Everybody has that. But a champion needs, in his attitude, a motivation above and beyond winning.

The most DIFFICULT thing for individuals to do when they become part of a team is to sacrifice, it is much EASIER to be selfish.

If you get tough mentally, you can get tough physically and overcome fatigue.

Management must speak with one voice. When it doesn't management itself becomes a peripheral opponent to the team's mission.

Anytime you stop striving to get better, you're bound to get worse.

If you have a positive attitude and constantly strive to give your best effort, eventually you will overcome your immediate problems and find you are ready for greater challenges.

When a great team loses through complacency, it will constantly search for new and more intricate explanations to explain away defeat.

From nobody to upstart. From upstart to contender. From contender to winner. From winner to champion. From champion to Dynasty.

Great teamwork is the only way we create the breakthroughs that define our careers.

When you're playing against a stacked deck, compete even harder.

In every contest, there comes a moment that separates winning from losing. The true warrior understands and seizes that moment.

Any team can be a miracle team. The catch is that you have got to go out and work for your miracles. Effort is what ultimately separates great teams from ordinary teams.

We sometimes need adversity to fathom our true depths.

There's no such thing as coulda, shoulda, or woulda. If you shoulda and coulda, you woulda done it.

When you leave it to chance, then all of a sudden you don't have any more luck.

Giving yourself permission to lose guarantees a loss.

You can only receive what you're willing to give.

To have long term success as a coach or in any position of leadership, you have to be obsessed in some way.

Never be ready to play yesterday. Being ready to play today is what's important

The true warrior understands and seizes that moment by giving an effort so intense and so intuitive that it could only be called one from the heart.

There can only be one state of mind as you approach any profound test; total concentration, a spirit of togetherness, and strength.

Great effort springs naturally from great attitude.

When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, its ready to climb.

Teamwork requires that everyone's efforts flow in a single direction. Feelings of significance happen when a team's energy takes on a life of its own.

No rebounds, no rings.

Great players and great teams want to be driven. They want to be pushed to the edge. They don't want to be cheated. Ordinary players and average teams want it to be easy

Look for your choices, pick the best one, then go with it.

Great players crave instruction on their weaknesses.

People who create 20% of the results will begin believing they deserve 80% of the rewards.

Being a part of success is more important than being personally indispensable.

There is no such thing as life in-between.

In every adversity, there is a seed of equivalent benefit.

I've learned to keep things simple. Look at your choices, pick the best one, then go to work with all your heart.

Commitment to the team - there is no such thing as in-between, you are either in our out.

Discipline is not a nasty word.

Basketball is a business. Pure and simple. If you want to have fun, go to the YMCA.

Basketball is a game of conditioning and fatigue. That's why I believe in practicing a team to train when it's exhausted.

It's what you get from games you lose that is extremely important.