Quotes from Mike Krzyzewski

Never let a person's weakness get in the way of their strength.

My hunger is not for success, it is for excellence. Because when you attain excellence, success just naturally follows.

I've been so fortunate in my life that my family has never been jealous of my success. They have shown true love and commitment to me by being supportive. They shared in it.

Sometimes in a defeat, you can set the stage for future victory. I wanted them to feel good about what they had accomplished. Not to like losing, but to like the success that they had.

Throughout my life, my mom has been the person that I've always looked up to.

I've tried to handle winning well, so that maybe we'll win again, but I've also tried to handle failure well. If those serve as good examples for teachers and kids, then I hope that would be a contribution I have made to sport. Not just basketball, but to sport.

Actually, the Kentucky moment was better than winning the two National Championships, because it was the epitome of what I try to get from a team in a crisis situation.

If the only reason I coached was to win basketball games, my life would be pretty shallow

I'm still not a great reader, but my wife is and my daughters are, and I envy them. I think I got into a bad habit of trying to do something all the time, instead of trying to sit down and take my time a little bit.

I always won in my imagination. I always hit the game-winning shot, or I hit the free throw. Or if I missed, there was a lane violation, and I was given another one.

I'm fortunate now that I coach at Duke University and we've won a lot. I have some kids who haven't failed that much. But when they get to college, they're going to fail some time. That's a thing that I can help them the most with.

Once you win a National Championship, how do you do that again? How do you get the passion to do that again? We won it again right away, the next year. A lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn't give myself an opportunity to enjoy the first one.

When I went to high school, an all-boys' school, a Catholic school, I tried out for football, and I didn't make it. It was the first time, athletically, that I was knocked down.

Leaders show respect for people by giving them time.

Are you going to show integrity only when someone is watching you - or are you going to show it all the time?

A leader's responsibility to his team is paramount. It overshadows even his own personal feelings at any given time.

When I was growing up, there weren't any Little Leagues in the city. Parents worked all the time. They didn't have time to take their kids out to play baseball and football.

First of all, what happens is, when you're good at something, you spend a lot of time with it. People identify you with that sport, so it becomes part of your identity.

I hated to lose.

Playing sport was somewhat frivolous, but I liked it. I rebelled a little bit, and wouldn't go to music lessons and things like that, but I would go and play ball. My parents learned to love it because they saw how much I got out of it.

Discipline is doing what you are supposed to do in the best possible manner at the time you are supposed to do it.

The thing I loved the most - and still love the most about teaching - is that you can connect with an individual or a group, and see that individual or group exceed their limits.

You develop a team to achieve what one person cannot accomplish alone. All of us alone are weaker, by far, than if all of us are together.

Our goal is not to win. It's to play together and play hard. Then, winning takes care of itself.