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

I have never felt so lonely as on a golf course in the midst of a championship with thousands of people around, especially when things began to go wrong and the crowds started wandering away.

Golf is the one game I know which becomes more and more difficult the longer one plays it.

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.

Nobody ever wins the National Open. Somebody loses it.

One reason golf is such an exasperating game is that a thing we learned is so easily forgotten, and we find ourselves struggling year after year with faults we had discovered and corrected time and again.

Rhythm and timing are the two things which we all must have, yet no one knows how to teach either.

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.

Doesn’t it show us all that we are silly little boys or fatuous asses to think that we can play golf without making a lot of bad shots?

Jack Nicklaus is playing an entirely different game, and one which I’m not even familiar with.

Competitive golf is played mainly on a five-and-a-half-inch course… the space between your ears.

Addressing a golf ball would seem to be a simple matter; that is, to the uninitiated who cannot appreciate that a golf ball can hold more terrors than a spacious auditorium packed with people.

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.

It is nevertheless a game of considerable passion, either of the explosive type, or that which burns inwardly and sears the soul.

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.

Nobody ever swung a club too slowly.

I always said you have to be really smart or really dumb to play this game well. I just don’t know where I fit in.

Be decisive. A wrong decision is generally less disastrous than indecision.

I’m certainly not a saint out there on the golf course. In fact, far from it. Like when you make a three-putt and become upset. I take one step back and remember there are more important things going on in the world than golf.

When I get a chance to play golf or go on a boat with good people, take the boat out and put some lobsters on the grill, get the ice-cold beer and the cigars – that’s heaven here on earth.

A good player who is a great putter is a match for any golfer. A great hitter who cannot putt is a match for no one.

I have always felt and said that a man who can be a champion in one era could be a champion in any other era because he has what it takes to reach the top.

When I practiced, I practiced to get it right.

I enjoy Augusta. I enjoy its challenges. There’s no other golf course like this anywhere. Its greens and its challenges on and around the greens are just super, super tough. So the greens are fun to play in sort of a morbid way