Top 141 Rugby Quotes

When it comes to rugby, I’m a Welshman through and through. I’m a huge fan; I’ve played rugby since I was seven. Unfortunately, I had to quit when I went to drama school because it doesn’t really go hand in had with being an actor.

I was a good reader of a rugby match. I could kick, too.

If there is no blood on the line, it is not rugby league.

I would have thought there’s no greater country to watch rugby than New Zealand.

I was a rugby player, I was a hockey player. You know, I just love to challenge myself, and I love to compete.

Look at rugby, the national sport, you have guys weighing 130kg, 140kg, who can run like sprinters full clip into each other causing brain damage constantly on that field.

For reasons that baffle me still, my high school sports coaches put me in the first division of the rugby, cricket, and soccer teams.

I never ever believed that I would be able to give up on this dream which has driven me to live, breathe, love and embrace the game of rugby from the earliest days that I can remember.

Playing rugby has been my whole life and for me, keeping fit was part of my job. But when I gave up my career, I was determined to keep motivated, and that isn’t always easy when you have lost the competitive edge to it.

I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event in which races were run, and I won these by a considerable margin.

I just want to concentrate on my rugby and enjoy it and live in the moment.

My brother and sister were very sporty. They all did rugby. I was very into performing arts. I went to the National Youth Music Theatre. I was one of those singing, clapping children.

I tried to play rugby but was never very good.

I wrestled before rugby league so I always had a pretty good wrestling background, a good base, and that helped with my football. It just meant my balance was always so good; a strong core, good hips and just things like that just really played a factor in how I ran the ball and tackled.

I admire rugged hard men who play rugby because it’s something I would never contemplate.

Mum used to take us to Breach Candy on the number 63 bus. After school, we’d swim, ride horses, play rugby.

Players want to play a lot of rugby. We’re walking contradictions at times in that we want to play a lot of rugby, but we don’t want to play too much rugby, and we want to be available for all the big games, yet there are times when you have to sacrifice that because of game limits.

I don’t think you need to go global rugby to save the Lions, but I think you need to go global rugby to save rugby and not lose things like the Lions.

I don’t watch rugby.

As a kid in New Zealand, you play cricket in summer and rugby in winter. I played cricket and hockey. Not rugby. I wasn’t brawny enough for it. Or silly enough, perhaps.

When I left rugby and bought my first commercial gym membership it was a shock to the system. I went in there and saw people training and thought ‘I’ve got to get out of here and get in a proper gym.’

People think of rugby players as being tough but it’s another thing to stand in front of someone and get kicked, punched, taken down. In rugby you have two contact sessions a week and you play a game on the weekend.

Rugby is great. The players don’t wear helmets or padding; they just beat the living daylights out of each other and then go for a beer. I love that.

I never had a concussion playing rugby.

I turned up my nose at yoga for years. I was a rugby player growing up. But now I know. When I’m on those long international flights, like 22 hours from L.A. to Sydney, I’ll get up sometimes and do yoga in the aisle just to stretch out a little bit.

Ultimately, we are professional rugby people, and we focus on the rugby. That’s the easy bit. We are not politicians, so we don’t have to delve too much into that.

Rugby is a game where everything is connected – from your kicking game to your defence to your set piece and attack.

I think New Zealand Rugby do an exceptional job, the way it’s set up from the All Blacks, right down to grassroots. There’s a clear path young players can take if they want to be an All Black, if they’re talented, or if they get opportunities.

The more expensive and/or exclusive a sport, the whiter it tends to be: the fact almost has the force of a law. That is the main reason why the Rugby World Cup, the Pacific islands excepted, was so desperately white, the Springboks included.

I don’t think anything can prepare you for the ‘Strictly’ experience. It really is insane. I mean, I played football, rugby, American football. I go to the gym. I like to think I’d be quite fit, and I don’t have much fat on me to lose, and yet I still lost a stone and half and three inches off my waist.

I just loved going fast. I still enjoy go-karting. I was also good at rugby, and my dad wanted me to be a sportsman, but I never thought I could do sports professionally.

I played rugby from the age of 10 until my late twenties; an unlikely player – small, quiet, long-haired and ‘wiry.’

I thought I’d be a professional rugby player or go to university and get some degree in construction.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the best team in the world, you can’t play rugby on your own try-line.

In reality, rugby is finite and unpredictable, so players need to have skills off the pitch too.

People can be really famous in Wales for rugby, but outside of Wales nobody really has a clue who you are or what you’ve done.

I have interests outside of rugby and have been cultivating them for when I do decide to hang up the boots.

I was always driven by the idea that if people ever found out about who I was then the stature I created for myself within rugby would have to be as relevant as the fact I was gay. It was always the driving factor to be the strongest, the fastest, the most skilful.

Wherever I am in my life, it’s because rugby has enabled me to do that.

To make this announcement fills me with great sadness, but I know I have been blessed in so many ways to have experienced what I have with the England rugby team.

Rugby and wrestling are sports for real athletes.

Once I realised what boxing was, I understood – this is the ultimate form of competition. Once you box you go back to the football field or rugby and it just doesn’t have the same spice.

As soon as I signed for the French rugby union, it was just a huge relief, you know, because I was out of Sydney and out of sight doing what was best for myself.

My parents are huge influences on me. My mother was an English teacher. My father played professional rugby and coached rugby for the Irish rugby team.

So I was in football, athletics doing shot put and sprinting, and rugby all at the same time. Ultimately, I didn’t know how serious you had to take one of them and I was just a kid wanting to do everything at once.

Rugby is a sport in which you can lose heavily one week and still come back and smash the opposition the next.

The popularity of rugby definitely grew in South Africa over the World Cup, and sport has great power, so hopefully it will make some difference. Even if it’s just 1%, it’s a bit of a change.

I grew up in Shropshire, but I was born in Wales. There was a hospital seven miles away, but my dad drove 45 miles over the Welsh border so I could play rugby for Wales. But as a skinny asthmatic, I was only ever good at swimming.

There was no way I was going to end up in the scrum when I came to rugby – you know, waste my pretty looks.

My sport was my comfort. The routine, the camaraderie, the team… everyone’s around you. After rugby you’re on your own.

It is the toughest, most macho of male sports, and with that comes an image. In many ways, it is barbaric, and I could never have come out without first establishing myself and earning respect as a player. Rugby was my passion, my whole life, and I wasn’t prepared to risk losing everything I loved.

Gay men are accepted in films, music and politics because people came out and broke the mould and stereotype in those industries. What I am trying to do is break the trend in rugby and sport in general and show any aspiring sportsman, regardless of his age, that the mould has been broken.

If I hadn’t had the rugby field to get rid of my aggression I would have been locked up a long time ago.

Every rugby player in Australia and New Zealand or wherever they are from wants to play in the World Cup, and I am no different.

Going to a final and winning is the best thing in life, and it makes rugby no longer a job. It makes it fun.

Rugby is a game that’s constant. If you are not growing with it, you get left behind.

Rugby has surprisingly helped me a lot as an astronaut and when I’m training in the space suit.

I went to an all-boys school, where I played rugby, so ballet wasn’t the coolest thing to do.

We are a rugby family really. My dad and both granddads played rugby. Dad was good, on his way to Bath until he broke his leg. My brother Harry got an invitation to go and play for Bristol. I go and watch Sale Sharks and have been to Twickenham a few times.