Success Quote by Harvey Penick

Sportsmanship is easy to applaud when it costs nothing; Penick’s line is about the moments it costs you something. “Be brave if you lose and meek if you win” isn’t a motivational poster so much as a pressure test for character under two kinds of stress: humiliation and power.

Penick, the legendary golf coach, is speaking from a sport where the opponent is often invisible and the ego is always in play. Losing tempts you toward self-pity, excuses, and the quiet shame that makes athletes shrink. “Brave” here means staying publicly intact: owning the result, learning in daylight, returning to the range without a performance of resentment. It’s courage as composure.

The second half is sharper. Winning, especially in individual sports, can turn into a moral accident. Victory hands you social permission to gloat, to rewrite the story so your talent looks inevitable and everyone else’s effort looks quaint. “Meek” is Penick’s antidote to the intoxication of being right. Not weak, not self-erasing - just disciplined enough to keep the win from turning into a personality.

The craft of the line is its symmetry: two short clauses, two opposite outcomes, one consistent standard. He’s quietly saying the real contest isn’t match play, it’s entitlement. If you can lose without theatrics and win without conquest, you’ve mastered the part of sport that actually follows you off the course: how you treat people when you’re wounded, and how you treat them when you’re on top.