Cycling quotes sum up the feeling of riding a bike. No matter who you are, from a professional cyclist to a sportive warrior, everyone experiences the same feelings on a bike. That mixture of pleasure and pain whilst having fun or striving for some training gains. Anyone on a bike feels the same freedoms and the release from day-to-day stresses whilst biking.
We all love cycling our local lanes and potentially seeing something for the first time. Everyone has suffered on a bike at some point in their lives. Seeing others cycle and where they’ve been riding inspires us too. That inspiration has given rise to many quotes over the years, from stars of the sport to everyday riders. Everyone from all walks of life has an opinion about the bicycle, as a result, there are many examples of bike ride quotes.
Pro Cyclist Quotes
Eddy Merckx
“Ride as much or as little, as long or as short as you feel. But ride”
“Don’t buy upgrades, ride up grades”
“The race is won by the rider who can suffer the most”
“Cyclists live with pain. If you can’t handle it you will win nothing”
“When it’s hurting you, that’s when you can make a difference”
Jens Voigt
“When my legs hurt, I say: “Shut up legs! Do what I tell you to do!”
“Beyond pain, there is a whole universe of more pain”
“If you go (with a break), you can either win or not win. If you don’t go for it, you definitely won’t win”
Greg LeMond
“It never gets easier, you just get faster”
“I have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle it’s not going to be satisfying”
Assorted Bike Quotes by Pro Cyclists
“As long as I breathe, I attack”
Bernard Hinault
“Crashing is part of cycling as crying is part of love”
Johan Museeuw
“To me, it doesn’t matter whether it’s raining or the sun is shining or whatever: as long as I’m riding a bike I know I’m the luckiest guy in the world”
Mark Cavendish
“Ride a bike. Ride a bike. Ride a bike” –
Fausto Coppi
“Good morale in cycling comes from good legs”
Sean Yates
“You can say that climbers suffer the same as the other riders, but they suffer in a different way. You feel the pain, but you’re glad to be there”
Richard Virenque
“I inherited that calm from my father, who was a farmer. You sow, you wait for good or bad weather, you harvest, but working is something you always need to do”
Miguel Indurain
“If you brake, you don’t win.”
Mario Cipollini
“In Mendrisio I felt it; the exhilaration of what the bike has to offer. It’s a simple machine that conjures a vast mix of emotions. It can evoke the senses and raise the spirits of people who watch. For those who ride it can seem like the perfect vehicle for transport. For those who race, there’s no better sensation than being on top of your gear making mountains feel like flat roads. Cycling throws up plenty of obstacles, unknown territory, high-speed split-second considerations. Where to next? What’s around the next corner? Who cares? You’re flyin’!”
Cadel Evans after winning the World Championships
“Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever”
Lance Armstrong
“Riding a bike is everything to a cyclist. The friendship and camaraderie you have with other cyclists… to a cyclist, it was the be-all and end-all of your life.”
Tommy Godwin
“Embrace your sweat. It is your essence and your emancipation.”
Kristin Armstrong
“Cycling isn’t a game, it’s a sport. Tough, hard and unpitying, and it requires great sacrifices. One plays football, or tennis, or hockey. One doesn’t play at cycling”
Jean de Gribaldy
“The bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine.”
John Howard
“If you do something right the first time, then it’s not hard enough.”
Danny MacAskill
“You are one ride away from a good mood.”
Sarah Bentley
“It is the unknown around the corner that turns my wheels”
Heinz Stucke
“When your legs scream stop and your lungs are bursting, that’s when it starts. That’s the hurt locker. Winners love it in there”
Chris McCormack
“You can’t get good by staying home. If you want to get fast, you have to go where the fast guys are”
Steve Larsen
“It doesn’t matter if you’re sprinting for an Olympic gold medal, a town sign, a trailhead, or the rest stop with the homemade brownies. If you never confront pain, you’re missing the essence of the sport”
Scott Martin
“People like to travel: that is why the grass is greener over the fence. We are walkers – our natural means of travel is to put one foot in front of the other. The bicycle seduces our basic nature by making walking exciting. It lets us take 10-foot strides at 160 paces a minute. That’s 20 miles an hour, instead of 4 or 5… It is not only how fast you go – cars are faster and jet planes faster still. But jet-plane travel is frustrating boredom – at least the car gives the pictorial illusion of travel. Cycling does it all – you have the complete satisfaction of arriving because your mind has chosen the path and steered you over it; your eyes have seen it; your muscles have felt it; your breathing, circulatory and digestive systems have all done their natural functions better than ever, and every part of your being knows you have travelled and arrived.”
John Forester
Other Cycling and Cyclist Quotes
Not just renowned cyclists enjoy enjoy giving their opinion about the bicycle. There are many cycling quotes from both well-known celebrities and those that can turn a good phrase too.
Politicians & Activists
“Nothing compares to the simple pleasure of riding a bike”
John F Kennedy
“When you ride a bike and you get your heart rate up and you’re out, after 30 or 40 minutes your mind tends to expand; it tends to relax.”
George W Bush
“Whoever invented the bicycle deserves the thanks of humanity”
Lord Charles Beresford
“Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.”
Helen Keller
“Your bike is discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are, when you’re on the saddle, you’re taken away.”
Doug Donaldson
“The bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.”
Susan B Anthony
“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 realise fishing is stupid and boring”
Desmond Tutu
Musicians & Composers
“Bicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls.”
Bob Weir
“As a kid I had a dream — I wanted to own my own bicycle. When I got the bike I must have been the happiest boy in Liverpool, maybe the world. I lived for that bike. Most kids left their bike in the backyard at night. Not me. I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed.”
John Lennon
“Cycling is possibly the greatest and most pleasurable form of transport ever invented. Its like walking only with one-tenth of the effort. Ride through a city and you can understand its geography in a way that no motorist, contained by one-way signs and traffic jams, will ever be able to. You can whiz from one side to the other in minutes. You can overtake £250,000 sports cars that are going nowhere fast. You can park pretty much anywhere. It truly is one of the greatest feelings of freedom once can have in a metropolitan environment. It’s amazing you can feel this free in a modern city.”
Deniel Pemberton
“A bicycle is a bit like a guitar in that they are both inert objects that only come alive and flourish when put in contact with a human being. Both have the ability to concentrate the mind. Just as when you are performing, you tend to lose yourself when you are on the bike. For those precious hours that you are in the saddle, nothing else matters except the bike and the road ahead.”
Gary Kemp
Scientists & Inventors
“Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving”
Albert Einstein
“If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles.”
Carl Sagan
“The bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.”
William Saroyan
“Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.”
Bill Nye
“A bicycle is the finest mode of transport known to man.”
Adam Hart-Davis
Authors & Journalists
“You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.”
Alan Bennett
“The bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.”
Iris Murdoch
“Learn to ride a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.”
Mark Twain
“Life is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.”
Charles M Schultz
“Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the human race.”
H G Wells
“Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia.”
H G Wells
“The bicycle saves my life every day. If you’ve ever experienced a moment of awe or freedom on a bicycle; if you’ve ever taken flight from sadness to the rhythm of two spinning wheels, or felt the resurgence of hope pedalling to the top of a hill with the dew of effort on your forehead; if you’ve ever wondered, swooping down bird-like down a long hill, if the world was standing still; if you have ever, just once, sat on a bicycle with a singing heart and felt like an ordinary human touching the gods, then we share something fundamental. We know it’s all about the bike.”
Robert Penn
“When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking”
Arthur Conan Doyle
“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”
Ernest Hemingway
“Those who wish to control their own lives and move beyond existence as mere clients and consumers — those people ride a bike.”
Wolfgang Sachs
“Melancholy is incompatible with bicycling.”
James E Starrs
“The bicycle is just as good company as most husbands and, when it gets old and shabby, a woman can dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.”
Ann Strong
“Truly, the bicycle is the most influential piece of product design ever.”
Hugh Pearman
“Cyclists see considerably more of this beautiful world than any other class of citizens. A good bicycle, well applied, will cure most ills this flesh is heir to”
Dr K.K. Doty
“A bicycle ride around the world begins with a single pedal stroke”
Scott Stoll
“Like dogs, bicycles are social catalysts that attract a superior category of people.”
Chip Brown
“The cyclist is a man half made of flesh and half of steel that only our century of science and iron could have spawned.”
Louis Baudry de Saunier
“Like dogs, bicycles are social catalysts that attract a superior category of people.”
Chip Brown
“Cycling has encoutered more enemies than any other form of exercise.”
Louis Baudry de Saunier
“You never have the wind with you — either it is against you or you’re having a good day.”
Daniel Behrman
“When man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.”
Elizabeth West
“Think of bicycles as ride-able art that can just about save the world.”
Grant Petersen
“Bicycles may change, but cycling is timeless.”
Zapata Espinoza
“Bicycling…is the nearest approximation I know to the flight of birds. The airplane simply carries a man on its back like an obedient Pegasus; it gives him no wings of his own. There are movements on a bicycle corresponding to almost all the variations in the flight of the larger birds. Plunging free downhill is like a hawk stooping. On the level stretches you may pedal with a steady rhythm like a heron flapping; or you may, like an accipitrine hawk, alternate rapid pedalling with gliding. If you want to test the force and direction of the wind, there is no better way than to circle, banked inward, like a turkey vulture. When you have the wind against you, headway is best made by yawing or wavering, like a crow flying upwind. I have climbed a steep hill by circling or spiralling, rising each time on the upturn with the momentum of the downturn, like any soaring bird. I have shot in and out of stalled traffic like a goshawk through the woods.”
Louis Halle
Actors
“One of the most important days of my life, was when I learned to ride a bicycle.”
Michael Palin
“I relax by taking my bicycle apart and putting it back together again.”
Michelle Pfeiffer
Miscellaneous bike quotes
“Bicycles are the indicator species of a community, like shellfish in a bay.”
P Martin Scott
“The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew, and live through it”
Doug Bradbury
“I don’t ride a bike to add days to my life. I ride a bike to add life to my days”
Unknown
“You either love spinning the pedals and watching scenery whiz by, or you don’t. And if you love it, not much can sour you on the idea of riding your bike.”
Keith Mills
“There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so worthwhile as simply messing about on bicycles.”
Tom Kunich
“Life may not be about your bike, but it can sure help you get through it.”
Hallmann
“Riding a bike is the best antidepressant drug and only has good side effects.”
Gunnar Rempel
“Bicycles have no walls.”
Paul Cornish
“A mountain bike is like your buddy. A road bike is your lover.”
Sean Coffey
Are there any cycling quotes that you know of that haven’t been included?
Let me know your favourite cyclist quotes in the comments below!
