Joe Paterno

“Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks.”

“In every life, there have to be some shadows. Look at me. My life has been filled with sunshine. A beautiful and caring wife. Five healthy children. I got to do what I loved. How many people are that lucky?”

“When a kid plays football games before he attends a class, something is wrong.”

“When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.”

“There are many people, particularly in sports, who think that success and excellence are the same thing. They are not the same thing. Excellence is something that is lasting and dependable and largely within a person's control. In contrast, success is perishable and is often outside our control. If you strive for excellence, you will probably be successful eventually. People who put excellence in the first place have the patience to end up with success. An additional burden for the victim of the success mentality is that he is threatened by the success of others and he resents real excellence. In contrast, the person that is fascinated by quality is excited when he sees it in others.”

“The name on the front of the jersey is what really matters, not the name on the back.”

“I really enjoyed coaching.”

“Here, I have an opportunity to affect the lives of a lot of young people - and not just on my football team. I'm not kidding myself that that would be true at the professional level.”

“My thing was play as hard as you can, don't be stupid, pay attention to details, and have enough guts in the clutch that you're not afraid to make a play. Some things I thought were important for a young man to know.”

“Believe deep down in your heart that you're destined to do great things.”

“I don't think it's fair to 12-, 13- and 14-year-olds to say 'Show us you're a winner right now!' Winning isn't everything. I'll never buy that thing that if a boy loses a football game, he's a loser in life.”

“To teach an academic subject is certainly not easy, but compared to coaching, it is. We can say 'two plus two is four' to every kid and be sure that we are right. But in coaching, we have to literally get to the soul of the people we are dealing with.”

“Its the name on the front of the jersey that matters most, not the one on the back.”

“Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.”

“Coaches have got to be given rank within the university so that you can't fire a coach unless you go through an academic committee, just as you would with a professor. If coaches are to have any stability and security, they need to be treated like an English professor.”

“You have to perform at a consistently higher level than others. That's the mark of a true professional.”

“We shall act with good intentions, but at times we will be wrong. When we are, let us admit it and try to right the situation.”

“Mostly I want to talk positive; I wanna talk about a bunch of great kids that I coached and made me look good and the university that I've seen grow from a cow college, which it was, only 12,000 people, and when I came here, we weren't at Pennsylvania State University, we were at Penn State College.”

“You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.”

“Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.”