Motivation Quote by Ernie Banks

Banks frames perseverance as something you manufacture, not something you wait to feel. “A kind of philosophy” is deliberately modest, almost shruggy, but it smuggles in a serious claim: momentum is a choice. The phrasing matters. He doesn’t say he has energy; he says he has to “create” it, as if drive is a daily construction project. That’s an athlete’s realism dressed up as optimism: bodies get tired, seasons drag, losses pile up, and the only reliable resource is the one you generate on purpose.

The subtext is especially resonant coming from Ernie Banks, a Hall of Famer most mythologized for his buoyant “Let’s play two” spirit while spending his prime on Cubs teams that rarely rewarded it. In that context, the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like a coping strategy for long stretches of futility. When your environment won’t reliably feed you wins, applause, or October baseball, you build an internal engine anyway. That’s not naïveté; it’s self-preservation.

There’s also a quiet rebuke here to the romantic idea of passion as an endless natural flame. Banks points toward a more sustainable model: discipline masquerading as joy. “Keep on going” is unglamorous, almost industrial, which is exactly why it lands. It’s a philosophy sized to the grind of a 162-game season, and to a life after the headlines, when you still have to show up and make something like energy out of will.