80 cycling quotes about riding

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The allure of cycling is perhaps best encapsulated in the words of those who mount the saddle, be it the seasoned professional cyclist or the weekend sportive enthusiast. These quotes distil the dichotomy of pleasure and pain that cycling engenders, whether one is revelling in the joy of a leisurely ride or pushing the envelope for performance gains. The common thread? The liberating sensation that comes from pedalling away, a respite from life’s everyday tensions and tribulations.

Cycling isn’t just a physical endeavour; it’s an emotional and psychological journey as well. As we navigate our local byways, sometimes we discover not just unexplored landscapes, but new facets of ourselves. The feeling of conquering a gruelling climb or enduring a long-distance journey has a universal appeal. Everyone, at one point or another, has tasted the sweet agony of exertion while biking, an experience that connects us all on a visceral level.

And it’s not just about the individual experience. Observing other cyclists, tracing their routes, and absorbing their adventures, adds another layer of inspiration. This collective fascination with cycling has birthed a multitude of quotes that capture the essence of the sport. From the luminary athletes to the casual riders who take to the bike paths on weekends, a wealth of perspectives contributes to an ever-growing repository of cycling wisdom.

The bicycle, then, is more than just a mechanical object with two wheels; it’s a symbol, an embodiment of freedom, challenge, and camaraderie. As a result, bike ride quotes are abundant, reflecting the complex tapestry of experiences and emotions that this seemingly simple machine can invoke. Whether from the podium finishers who’ve carved their names in the annals of the sport, or from everyday riders who find solace and inspiration in turning the pedals, the bicycle remains a muse for commentary and reflection, resonating across different strata of society.

Pro Cyclist Quotes

Eddy Merckx

โ€œRide as much or as little, as long or as short as you feel. But rideโ€

โ€œDonโ€™t buy upgrades, ride up gradesโ€

โ€œThe race is won by the rider who can suffer the mostโ€

โ€œCyclists live with pain. If you canโ€™t handle it you will win nothingโ€

โ€œWhen itโ€™s hurting you, thatโ€™s when you can make a differenceโ€

Jens Voigt

โ€œWhen my legs hurt, I say: โ€œShut up legs! Do what I tell you to do!โ€

โ€œBeyond pain, there is a whole universe of more painโ€

โ€œIf you go (with a break), you can either win or not win. If you donโ€™t go for it, you definitely wonโ€™t winโ€

Greg LeMond

โ€œIt never gets easier, you just get fasterโ€

โ€œI have always struggled to achieve excellence. One thing that cycling has taught me is that if you can achieve something without a struggle itโ€™s not going to be satisfyingโ€

Johan Museeuw

Assorted Bike Quotes by Pro Cyclists

โ€œAs long as I breathe, I attackโ€
Bernard Hinault

โ€œCrashing is part of cycling as crying is part of loveโ€
Johan Museeuw

โ€œTo me, it doesnโ€™t matter whether itโ€™s raining or the sun is shining or whatever: as long as Iโ€™m riding a bike I know Iโ€™m the luckiest guy in the worldโ€
Mark Cavendish

โ€œRide a bike. Ride a bike. Ride a bikeโ€ โ€“ 
Fausto Coppi

โ€œGood morale in cycling comes from good legsโ€ 
Sean Yates

โ€œYou can say that climbers suffer the same as the other riders, but they suffer in a different way. You feel the pain, but youโ€™re glad to be thereโ€
Richard Virenque

Richard Virenque Festina
Richard Virenque

โ€œI 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 doโ€
Miguel Indurain

โ€œIf you brake, you donโ€™t win.โ€
Mario Cipollini

โ€œIn Mendrisio, I felt it; the exhilaration of what the bike has to offer. Itโ€™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, thereโ€™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, and high-speed split-second considerations. Where to next? Whatโ€™s around the next corner? Who cares? Youโ€™re flyinโ€™!โ€ย 
Cadel Evans after winning the World Championships

โ€œPain 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

โ€œRiding a bike is everything to a cyclist. The friendship and camaraderie you have with other cyclistsโ€ฆ to a cyclist, it was the be-all and end-all of your life.โ€
Tommy Godwin

โ€œEmbrace your sweat. It is your essence and your emancipation.โ€
Kristin Armstrong

โ€œCycling isnโ€™t a game, itโ€™s a sport. Tough, hard and unpitying, and it requires great sacrifices. One plays football, or tennis, or hockey. One doesnโ€™t play at cyclingโ€
Jean de Gribaldy

โ€œThe bicycle is a curious vehicle. Its passenger is its engine.โ€
John Howard

โ€œIf you do something right the first time, then itโ€™s not hard enough.โ€
Danny MacAskill

โ€œYou are one ride away from a good mood.โ€
Sarah Bentley

Danny MacAskill

โ€œIt is the unknown around the corner that turns my wheelsโ€
Heinz Stucke

โ€œWhen your legs scream stop and your lungs are bursting, thatโ€™s when it starts. Thatโ€™s the hurt locker. Winners love it in thereโ€
Chris McCormack

โ€œYou canโ€™t get good by staying home. If you want to get fast, you have to go where the fast guys areโ€
Steve Larsen

โ€œIt doesnโ€™t matter if youโ€™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, youโ€™re missing the essence of the sportโ€
Scott Martin

โ€œPeople like to travel: that is why the grass is greener over the fence. We are walkers โ€“ 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. Thatโ€™s 20 miles an hour, instead of 4 or 5โ€ฆ It is not only how fast you go โ€“ cars are faster and jet planes are faster still. But jet-plane travel is frustrating boredom โ€“ at least the car gives the pictorial illusion of travel. Cycling does it all โ€“ 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.โ€ย 
John Forester

Other Cycling and Cyclist Quotes

Not just renowned cyclists enjoy giving their opinions about the bicycle. There are many cycling quotes from both well-known celebrities and those that can turn a good phrase too.


Politicians & Activists

โ€œNothing compares to the simple pleasure of riding a bikeโ€
John F Kennedy

โ€œWhen you ride a bike and you get your heart rate up and youโ€™re out, after 30 or 40 minutes your mind tends to expand; it tends to relax.โ€
George W Bush

โ€œWhoever invented the bicycle deserves the thanks of humanityโ€
Lord Charles Beresford

โ€œToleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle.โ€
Helen Keller

โ€œYour bike is discovery; your bike is freedom. It doesn’t matter where you are, when you’re on the saddle, you’re taken away.โ€
Doug Donaldson

Susan B Anthony

โ€œThe bicycle has done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in the world.โ€ 
Susan B Anthony

โ€œGive 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 boringโ€
Desmond Tutu


Musicians & Composers

โ€œBicycles are almost as good as guitars for meeting girls.โ€
Bob Weir

โ€œAs a kid, I had a dream โ€” 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 bikes in the backyard at night. Not me. I insisted on taking mine indoors and the first night I even kept it in my bed.โ€
John Lennon

โ€œCycling 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 ยฃ250,000 sports cars that are going nowhere fast. You can park pretty much anywhere. It truly is one of the greatest feelings of freedom one can have in a metropolitan environment. Itโ€™s amazing you can feel this free in a modern city.โ€
Deniel Pemberton

John Lennon

โ€œA 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.โ€
Gary Kemp


Scientists & Inventors

โ€œLife is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep movingโ€
Albert Einstein

โ€œIf constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles.โ€ 
Carl Sagan

โ€œThe bicycle is the noblest invention of mankind.โ€
William Saroyan

Adam Hart Davis

โ€œBicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. Thereโ€™s something wrong with a society that drives a car to workout in a gym.โ€
Bill Nye

โ€œA bicycle is the finest mode of transport known to man.โ€
Adam Hart-Davis


Authors & Journalists

โ€œYou always know when youโ€™re going to arrive. If you go by car, you donโ€™t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.โ€
Alan Bennett

โ€œThe bicycle is the most civilised conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart.โ€
Iris Murdoch

โ€œLearn to ride a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.โ€ 
Mark Twain

Albert Einstein

โ€œLife is like a 10-speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.โ€
Charles M Schultz

โ€œWhenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the human race.โ€
H G Wells

โ€œCycle tracks will abound in Utopia.โ€
H G Wells

โ€œThe 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.โ€
Robert Penn

โ€œWhen 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 takingโ€
Arthur Conan Doyle

โ€œIt 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 themโ€
Ernest Hemingway

โ€œThose who wish to control their own lives and move beyond existence as mere clients and consumers โ€” those people ride a bike.โ€ 
Wolfgang Sachs

โ€œMelancholy is incompatible with bicycling.โ€
James E Starrs

โ€œThe 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.โ€
Ann Strong

Ernest Hemmingway

โ€œTruly, the bicycle is the most influential piece of product design ever.โ€
Hugh Pearman

โ€œCyclists 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 toโ€
Dr K.K. Doty

โ€œA bicycle ride around the world begins with a single pedal strokeโ€
Scott Stoll

โ€œLike dogs, bicycles are social catalysts that attract a superior category of people.โ€
Chip Brown

โ€œThe cyclist is a man half made of flesh and half of steel that only our century of science and iron could have spawned.โ€
Louis Baudry de Saunier

โ€œLike dogs, bicycles are social catalysts that attract a superior category of people.โ€
Chip Brown

โ€œCycling has encountered more enemies than any other form of exercise.โ€
Louis Baudry de Saunier

โ€œYou never have the wind with you โ€” either it is against you or youโ€™re having a good day.โ€
Daniel Behrman

Grant Petersen

โ€œWhen man invented the bicycle he reached the peak of his attainments.โ€
Elizabeth West

โ€œThink of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world.โ€
Grant Petersen

โ€œBicycles may change, but cycling is timeless.โ€
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

โ€œOne of the most important days of my life, was when I learned to ride a bicycle.โ€
Michael Palin

โ€œI relax by taking my bicycle apart and putting it back together again.โ€ 
Michelle Pfeiffer

Michael Palin

Miscellaneous bike quotes

โ€œBicycles are the indicator species of a community, like shellfish in a bay.โ€
P Martin Scott

โ€œThe best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew, and live through itโ€
Doug Bradbury

โ€œI donโ€™t ride a bike to add days to my life. I ride a bike to add life to my daysโ€
Unknown

โ€œYou either love spinning the pedals and watching the scenery whiz by, or you donโ€™t. And if you love it, not much can sour you on the idea of riding your bike.โ€ย 
Keith Mills

โ€œThere is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so worthwhile as simply messing about on bicycles.โ€
Tom Kunich

โ€œLife may not be about your bike, but it can sure help you get through it.โ€
Hallmann

โ€œRiding a bike is the best antidepressant drug and only has good side effects.โ€
Gunnar Rempel

โ€œBicycles have no walls.โ€
Paul Cornish

โ€œA mountain bike is like your buddy. A road bike is your lover.โ€
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!