Kobe Bean Bryant was an American professional basketball player. As a shooting guard, Bryant entered the National Basketball Association (NBA) directly from high school, and played his entire 20-season professional career in the league with the Los Angeles Lakers. Bryant won many accolades: five NBA championships, 18-time All-Star, 15-time member of the All-NBA Team, 12-time member of the All-Defensive Team, 2008 NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP), two-time NBA Finals MVP winner.
He was widely regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. At 34 years and 104 days of age, Bryant became the youngest player in league history to reach 30,000 career points. He became the all-time leading scorer in Lakers franchise history on February 1, 2010, surpassing Jerry West. Bryant was also the first guard in NBA history to play at least 20 seasons.
His 18 All-Star designations are the second most all time, while it is the record for most consecutive appearances as a starter. Bryant’s four All-Star MVP Awards are tied with Bob Pettit for the most in NBA history. He gave himself the nickname “Black Mamba” in the mid-2000s, relating to the eponymous snake’s ability to “strike with 99% accuracy at maximum speed, in rapid succession”, and the epithet became widely adopted by the general public.
At the 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics, he won two gold medals as a member of the U.S. national team. Citing his physical decline, Bryant retired after the 2015-16 season. In 2018, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for his 2017 film Dear Basketball. On January 26, 2020, Bryant was killed, along with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, in a helicopter crash in Calabasas, California.
Some of the best quotes from Kobe Bryant are listed below.
- “Are you willing to push the right buttons even if it means being perceived as the villain?…I’d rather be perceived as a winner than a good teammate. I wish they both went hand in hand all the time but that’s just not reality…I have nothing in common with lazy people who blame others for their lack of success.” – Kobe Bryant
- “As I sit here now, when I take off my shoe and I look down at my scar, I see beauty in it. I see all the hard work, all the sacrifices. I see the journey that it took to get back to this point of being healthy. And I see beauty in that struggle. That’s what makes it beautiful.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Be willing to sacrifice anything, but compromise nothing in your quest to be your best.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Being a leader, it’s the art of trying to find the balance, the right times with each individual and what they need at that moment. It requires looking outward as opposed to looking inside.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Can I jump over two or three guys like I used to? No. Am I as fast as I used to be? No, but I still have the fundamentals and smarts. That’s what enables me to still be a dominant player. As a kid growing up, I never skipped steps. I always worked on fundamentals because I know athleticism is fleeting.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Dedication sees dreams come true.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Determination silences doubters.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Either way, I refuse to change what I am. A lion has to eat. Run with me or run from me. – Kobe Bryant
- “Everything negative – pressure, challenges – is all an opportunity for me to rise.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Heroes come and go, but legends are forever.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I create my own path. It was straight and narrow. I looked at it this way: you were either in my way, or out of it. If you were standing between me and the game, I was going to knock you on your back and not feel bad about it. I was unapologetically me. That’s all I ever wanted to be I was never worried about my reputation- that’s how I earned one. That’s how I became the Black Mamba.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I don’t just try to score. The challenge is elevating my teammates to be able to win a championship.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I don’t want to be the next Michael Jordan, I only want to be Kobe Bryant.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I focus on one thing and one thing only – that’s trying to win as many championships as I can.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I have self-doubt. I have insecurity. I have fear of failure. I have nights when I show up at the arena and I’m like, ‘My back hurts, my feet hurt, my knees hurt. I don’t have it. I just want to chill.’ We all have self-doubt. You don’t deny it, but you also don’t capitulate to it. You embrace it.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I never tried to prove anything to someone else. I wanted to prove something to myself.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I saw things differently. I didn’t want to do what others had done. That didn’t drive me, didn’t get me in the gym before others got up. I wanted to do one better. Actually, I wanted to do a lot better. There were players I looked up to until I looked them square in the eyes. I know that one day, when I left the game, I didn’t actually want to leave. I wanted to leave my mark.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I wanna be the best, simple and plain.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I was probably born a scorer, but I was made a winner. Whatever works, whatever wins championships, wins games, that’s what I do.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I’ll do whatever it takes to win games, whether it’s sitting on a bench waving a towel, handing a cup of water to a teammate, or hitting the game-winning shot.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I’m playing against great players, playing against the best in the world. The competition – that’s what I’ve always wanted.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I’m reflective only in the sense that I learn to move forward. I reflect with a purpose.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I’ve played with IVs before, during and after games. I’ve played with a broken hand, a sprained ankle, a torn shoulder, a fractured tooth, a severed lip, and a knee the size of a softball. I don’t miss 15 games because of a toe injury that everybody knows wasn’t that serious in the first place.” – Kobe Bryant
- “I’ve shot too much from the time I was 8 years old. But ‘too much’ is a matter of perspective. Some people thought Mozart had too many notes in his compositions. Let me put it this way: I entertain people who say I shoot too much. I find it very interesting. Going back to Mozart, he responded to critics by saying there were neither too many notes or too few. There were as many as necessary.” – Kobe Bryant
- “If you are going to be a leader, you’re not going to please everybody. You got to hold people accountable, even if you have that moment of being uncomfortable.” – Kobe Bryant
- “If you don’t believe in yourself, no one will do it for you.” – Kobe Bryant
- “If you make it, great. If you miss it, what’s there to be afraid of?” – Kobe Bryant
- “If you want to make history, you have to do historic things.” – Kobe Bryant
- “If you’re afraid to fail, then you’re probably going to fail.” – Kobe Bryant
- “It doesn’t bother me at all. Do I hold any hard feelings? Not at all,…Life is too short to sit around and hold grudges. I don’t hold any whatsoever.” – Kobe Bryant
- “It’s not about the number of hours you practice, it’s about the number of hours your mind is present during the practice.” – Kobe Bryant
- “It’s the one thing you can control. You are responsible for how people remember you—or don’t. So don’t take it lightly. If you do it right, your game will live on in others. You’ll be imitated and emulated by those you played with, those you played against and those who never saw you play at all. So leave everything on the court. Leave the game better than you found it. And when it comes time for you to leave, leave a legend.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Learn to love the hate. Embrace it. Enjoy it. You earned it. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and everyone should have one about you. Haters are a good problem to have. Nobody hates the good ones. They hate the great ones.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Listen to how everyone is talking about you. You have to use it as fuel for motivation.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Losers visualize the penalties of failure. Winners visualize the rewards of success.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Losing is losing, there aren’t different degrees of losing. You either win a championship or you’re shit. It’s very black & white to me.” – Kobe Bryant
- “My brain…it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I sit there and have to face myself and tell myself, ‘You’re a failure’…I think that’s almost worse than death.” – Kobe Bryant
- “My parents are my backbone. Still are. They’re the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40.” – Kobe Bryant
- “On being forced to retire if his hand fell off: “Even then, you could still play with one hand.”” – Kobe Bryant
- “Once you know what failure feels like, determination chases success.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Pain doesn’t tell you when you ought to stop. Pain is the little voice in your head that tries to hold you back because it knows if you continue you will change. Don’t let it stop you from being who you can be. Exhaustion tells you when you ought to stop. You only reach your limit when you can go no further.” – Kobe Bryant
- “People just don’t understand how obsessed I am with winning.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Sports are such a great teacher. I think of everything they’ve taught me: camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Take it all in. Sit back and watch and listen and hear all the hate that’s being thrown at us and remember every person that’s kicking you when you’re down, because next year it ain’t gonna be this way. Appreciate it now. Let it sit in now, because revenge is sweet and it’s quick.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The beauty in being blessed with talent is rising above doubters to create a beautiful moment.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The biggest dreams aren’t fueled by belief. They’re fueled by doubt.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The hunger [to succeed] is the same, no matter what it is that you’re doing. It’s like an unquenchable thirst to learn more, or to feel like you could have done more, and to be brutally honest and self critical, which is very hard to do. It’s easy, and human nature is to just blame somebody else. It’s very, very hard to self assess.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The moment you give up, is the moment you let someone else win.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The most important thing is you must put everybody on notice that you’re here and you are for real. I’m not a player that is just going to come and go. I’m not a player that is going to make an All-Star team one time, two times. I’m here to be an all-time great. Once I made that commitment and said, ‘I want to be one of the greatest ever’, then the game became everything for me.” – Kobe Bryant
- “The topic of leadership is a touchy one. A lot of leaders fail because they don’t have the bravery to touch that nerve or strike that chord. Throughout my years, I haven’t had that fear.” – Kobe Bryant
- “There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own.” – Kobe Bryant
- “There’s a choice that we have to make as people, as individuals. If you want to be great at something, there’s a choice you have to make. We all can be masters at our craft, but you have to make a choice. What I mean by that is, there are inherent sacrifices that come along with that. Family time, hanging out with friends, being a great friend, being a great son, nephew, whatever the case may be. There are sacrifices that come along with making that decision.” – Kobe Bryant
- “There’s a reason why players that have multiple championships have multiple championships. There’s a certain characteristic and an understanding and knowledge and that’s not something that’s easily taught. You kind of have to go through it and it kind of has to be part of your DNA from the beginning.” – Kobe Bryant
- “These young guys are playing checkers. I’m out there playing chess.” – Kobe Bryant
- “To be an event, every single night. Something witnessed. Not just watched. I had a different drive. The kind that made people uneasy. Some people wanted me to come back down to earth. To come down to their level.To relax. But I couldn’t. It wasn’t in my DNA. Because to go where others have never gone, you have to do what others have never done.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Trust me, setting things up right from the beginning will avoid a ton of tears and heartache…” – Kobe Bryant
- “Use your success, wealth and influence to put them in the best position to realise their own dreams and find their true purpose. Put them through school, set them up with job interviews and help them become leaders in their own right. Hold them to the same level of hard work and dedication that it took for you to get where you are now, and where you will eventually go.” – Kobe Bryant
- “We can always kind of be average and do what’s normal. I’m not in this to do what’s normal.” – Kobe Bryant
- “We don’t quit, we don’t cower, we don’t run. We endure and conquer.” – Kobe Bryant
- “What I’m doing right now, I’m chasing perfection… and if I don’t get it, I’m going to get this close.” – Kobe Bryant
- “Winning takes precedence over all. There’s no gray area. No almosts.” – Kobe Bryant
- “You always have to be on edge. You always have to take every practice, every game, like it is your last.” – Kobe Bryant
- “You can’t be held captive by the fear of failure or the fear of what people may say.” – Kobe Bryant
- “You need to figure out a way to invest in the future of your family and friends. This sounds simple, and you may think it’s a no-brainer, but take some time to think on it further. I said INVEST. I did not say GIVE.” – Kobe Bryant
“Be willing to sacrifice anything, but compromise nothing in your quest to be your best”-KBB
This hits hard every time✊✊