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.
Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course... the space between your ears.
The main idea in golf as in life, I suppose is to learn to accept what cannot be altered and to keep on doing one's own reasoned and resolute best whether the prospect be bleak or rosy.
The real way to enjoy playing golf is to take pleasure not in the score, but in the execution of strokes.
You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank as to praise him for playing by the rules.
The rewards of golf, and of life too I expect, are worth very little if you don't play the game by the etiquette as well as by the rules.
I never learned anything from a match that I won.
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.
Golf is the only game I know of that actually becomes harder the longer you play it.
No-one will ever have golf under his thumb. No round ever will be so good it could not have been better. Perhaps this is why golf is the greatest of games. You are not playing a human adversary; you a playing a game. You are playing old man par.
Golf is a game that creates emotions that sometimes cannot be sustained with the club still in one's hand.
The toughest opponent of all is Old Man Par. He's a patient soul who never shoots a birdie and never incurs a bogey. And if you would travel the long road with him, you must be patient, too.
In order to win, you must play your best golf when you need it most, and play your sloppy stuff when you can afford it. I shall not attempt to explain how you achieve this happy timing.
Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course
Golf is recognized as one of the more difficult games to play or teach. One reason for this is that each person necessarily plays by feel, and a feel is almost impossible to describe.
A leading difficulty with the average player is that he totally misunderstands what is meant by concentration. He may think he is concentrating hard when he is merely worrying.
Many shots are spoiled at the last instant by efforts to add a few more yards.
On the golf course, a man may be the dogged victim of inexorable fate, be struck down by an appalling stroke of tragedy, become the hero of unbelievable melodrama, or the clown in a side-splitting comedy.
The 'enemy' in golf is tension.
As I see it, the thing that hurt my putting most when it was bad, was thinking too much about how I was making the stroke and not enough about getting the ball in the hole.
In golf, the customs and etiquette and decorum are as important as the rules of play.
Golf is assuredly a mystifying game. It would seem that if a person has hit a golf ball correctly a thousand times, he should be able to duplicate the performance at will. But such is certainly not the case.
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.
I think that (Alister) MacKenzie and I managed to work as a completely sympathetic team. Of course there was never any question that he was the architect and I was the advisor and consultant. No man learns to design a golf course simply by playing golf, no matter how well. But it happened that both of us were extravagant admirers of the Old Course at St Andrews and we both desired as much as possible to simulate seaside conditions insofar as the differences in turf and terrain would allow.
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