Basketball Coach Quotes Jim Valvano Quotes

Jim Valvano Quotes

Jim Valvano coached nineteen years, including at Johns Hopkins, Bucknell, Iona, and North Carolina State.

Over that span, he compiled a 346-212 record and was twice voted ACC coach of the year.

In 1983 and 1987, he won the ACC Championship and in 1983 his North Carolina State team won the NCAA Championship.

Who can forget Valvano running onto the court after the 1983 championship in disbelief that they’d won? What a moment! Nicknamed “Jimmy V”, Jim Valvano died on April 28, 1993.

As part of our Basketball Coach Quotes Series, we bring you “Jim Valvano Quotes”.

When you’re done enjoying the following Jim Valvano quotes, you can visit our Great Basketball Quotes for hundreds of more basketball quotes.

Now, on to the Jim Valvano Quotes!

Jim Valvano Quotes (1-5)

    • “Be a dreamer. If you don’t know how to dream, you’re dead.”
    • “To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you’re going to have something special.”
    • “I asked a ref if he could give me a technical foul for thinking bad things about him. He said, of course not. I said, well, I think you stink. And he have me a technical. You can’t trust em.”
    • “My father gave me the greatest gift anyone could give another person, he believed in me.”
    • “We need your help. I need your help. We need money for research. It may not save my life. It may save my children’s life. It may save someone you love. And it’s very important.”

Jim Valvano Quotes (6-10)

    • “How do you go from where you are to where you want to be? I think you have to have an enthusiasm for life. You have to have a dream, a goal, and you have to be willing to work for it.”
    • “There are 86,400 seconds in a day. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them.”
    • “But try if you can to support, whether it’s AIDS or the cancer foundation, so that someone else might survive, might prosper, and might actually be cured of this dreaded disease.”
    • “No matter what business you’re in, you can’t run in place or someone will pass you by. It doesn’t matter how many games you’ve won.”
    • “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.”

Jim Valvano Quotes (11-15)

    • “I can’t tell you what an honor it is, to even be mentioned in the same breath with Arthur Ashe. This is something I certainly will treasure forever.”
    • “Cancer can take away all of my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.”
    • “Now, I look at where I am now and I know what I wanna to do. What I would like to be able to do is to spend whatever time I have left and to give, and maybe some hope to others.”
    • “Never give up! Failure and rejection are only the first step to succeeding.”
    • “I rode on the plane up today with Mike Krzyzewski, my good friend and wonderful coach. People don’t realize he’s ten times a better person than he is a coach, and we know he’s a great coach.”

Jim Valvano Quotes (16-20)

  • “It’s so important to know where you are.”
  • “I talked about my family, my family’s so important.”
  • “I just got one last thing, I urge all of you, all of you, to enjoy your life, the precious moments you have. To spend each day with some laughter and some thought, to get you’re emotions going.”
  • “Time is very precious to me. I don’t know how much I have left and I have some things that I would like to say. Hopefully, at the end, I will have said something that will be important to other people too.”
  • “The very first time you stood in the locker room to give a pep talk. That’s a special place, the locker room, for a coach to give a talk.”