Motivation Quote by Satchel Paige

Paige is selling a kind of swagger that doesn’t need an audience. Coming from a pitcher who spent years dominating in the Negro Leagues before Major League Baseball finally let him in, the line reads less like a Hallmark maxim and more like survival advice from someone who watched the world grade him with a crooked rubric. When the crowd’s applause is conditional and the criticism is often political, emotional neutrality becomes a competitive edge.

The genius is in the balance: “not to be cheered,” “not to be grieved.” He’s not arguing for numbness so much as refusing to outsource your self-worth to people who don’t have to live inside your skin. Praise can soften you into complacency; blame can bait you into playing scared. Paige frames both as distractions from the only metric you can actually control: “to know thoroughly” your abilities. That verb matters. It’s not “believe in yourself” fluff. It’s scouting-report self-knowledge: what you throw well, what you don’t, what your body can still do today.

There’s also a quiet rebuke to hero worship. Paige, a master showman, understood that charisma can become a trap if you start pitching to the legend instead of the batter. “Excellent man” is old-fashioned phrasing, but the intent is modern: build an internal scoreboard. In a culture that runs on instant feedback, he’s insisting that excellence is an inside job, and that the loudest opinions are rarely the most accurate.