Words of Wisdom: The 21 Most Memorable Cycling Quotes

It’s important to take some time once in awhile to reflect on the beauty and joy of cycling. Over the years, this has been eloquently expressed by a wide variety of notable people. I’ve gone ahead and assembled what I think are the most memorable and inspirational of these quotes. Some of them are familiar, and others are less known. But all of them are sure to resonate with the cyclist’s soul.


Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live. --Mark Twain


It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle. --Ernest Hemingway


The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets. --Christopher Morley


Give me good books, good conversations, and my Trek Y-Foil, and I shall want for nothing else. –George Plimpton


When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. --H.G. Wells


I’m the paté on the Universal cracker. I’m the grout holding your shower tiles on. I’m out of the saddle, sprinting up that hill and eating glazed donut bracelets off the right arm of Jesus. –Charles Manson


Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of a bike ride. --John F. Kennedy


Give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Teach a man to cycle and he will realize fishing is stupid and boring. –Desmond Tutu


Consider a man riding a bicycle. Whoever he is, we can say three things about him. We know he got on the bicycle and started to move. We know that at some point he will stop and get off. Most important of all, we know that if at any point between the beginning and the end of his journey he stops moving and does not get off the bicycle he will fall off it. That is a metaphor for the journey through life of any living thing, and I think of any society of living things. --William Golding


My favorite toast is rye toast. –Paris Hilton


I came out for exercise, gentle exercise, and to notice the scenery and to botanise. And no sooner do I get on that accursed machine than off I go hammer and tongs; I never look to right or left, never notice a flower, never see a view - get hot, juicy, red - like a grilled chop. Get me on that machine and I have to go. I go scorching along the road, and cursing aloud at myself for doing it. --H.G. Wells


My father is the Hollywood equivalent of a clean, fillet-brazed frame. My brother is like one of those fat-tubed aluminum Cannondales. I’m more like one of those Taiwanese Masis. –Emilio Estevez


As a child growing up in pre-gentrification Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, I went everywhere by bicycle. My bike was in many ways the key to my neighborhood, which, at the time, was Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. This was in the 60s and 70s, before all the white people and restaurants. I really can’t underscore boldly enough the fact that I grew up in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, before it was gentrified. You could get mugged! --Jonathan Lethem


Bikes have wheels. –Noam Chomsky


If my career were a hairstyle, it would be helmet-head. –Laura Dern


Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of the local wheelmen, led by my father, stopping at our home to eat pone, sip mint juleps, and flog the field hands. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to bicycles. –Tennessee Williams


Bicycles are the new rollerblades, talentless is the new talented, and I’m in hog heaven. –Ryan Seacrest


Perhaps the most vivid recollection of my youth is that of being flogged by the local wheelmen, along with the fieldhands, the postman, and a young Tennessee Williams. This more than anything cultivated my life-long aversion to his plays. –Truman Capote


If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we’d be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today. –Ralph Nader


Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia. --H.G. Wells


It’s like “Animal Planet,” except with bicycles instead of animals. –Ryan Seacrest, on his new all-bicycle TV network