Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won't taste good.
Joe Paterno
Believe deep down in your heart that you're destined to do great things.
Its the name on the front of the jersey that matters most, not the one on the back.
The will to win is important, but the will to prepare is vital.
When a team outgrows individual performance and learns team confidence, excellence becomes a reality.
Besides pride, loyalty, discipline, heart, and mind, confidence is the key to all the locks.
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.
It doesn't matter what people think of me. I've lived my life.
Losing a game is heartbreaking. Losing your sense of excellence or worth is a tragedy.
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.
The minute you think you've got it made, disaster is just around the corner.
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.
What is a coach? We are teachers. Educators. We have the same obligations as all teachers, except we probably have more influence over young people than anybody but their families. And, in a lot of cases, more than their families.
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.
The name on the front of the jersey is what really matters, not the name on the back.
I'm not as concerned about me. What's happened to me has been great. I got five great kids. Seventeen grandchildren.
Publicity is like poison; it doesn't hurt unless you swallow it.
You need to play with supreme confidence, or else you'll lose again, and then losing becomes a habit.
You must relate athletic experiences to life.
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.
I've had a wonderful experience here at Penn State.
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.
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?
I really enjoyed coaching.
I don't think I deviated from what I'm all about and what I thought was important. Whether you want to call that a legacy, or whatever you want to call it.
We have to realize a kid will love us one day and hate us the next. That cannot change who we are and what we are about.
When a kid plays football games before he attends a class, something is wrong.
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.
