"No putt is too small to be despised."

"I never learned anything from a match I won."

"Friends are a man’s priceless treasures, and a life rich in friendship is full indeed."

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

"The object of golf is to beat someone. Make sure that someone is not yourself."

"The difference between a sand trap and water hazard is the difference between a car crash and an airplane crash. You have a chance of recovering from a car crash."

On being told that the temperature on a tournament day was predicted to be 105º in the shade: “It’s a good thing we don’t have to play in the shade."

”Too much ambition is a bad thing to have in a bunker."

"Always play to win. . . . You owe it to your opponent to let him know that he only wins when he overcomes the best you can do."

On calling penalty strokes on himself: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank."

"It is nothing new or original to say that golf is played one stroke at a time. But it took me many years to realize it."

"My best scores have always been when I had run into a streak in the midst of a round – late enough to permit me to get back to the clubhouse before I entirely regained consciousness."

When asked about suffering from Syringomyelia: “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 as it lies."

And perhaps his most famous quote of all:
"On the golf course, a man may be a dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of an unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy – any of these within a few hours, and all without having to bury a corpse or repair a tangled personality."