Shoe Dog (Young Readers Edition)

by Phil Knight

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself, said the Buddha,

Japanese literature, philosophy, clothing, domestic life, all were marvelously pure and spare. Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook.

Every few seconds, CLING-clong, CLING-clong, a cobbler’s concerto.

I’d read that “tycoon” came from taikun, Japanese for “warlord.”

Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then. Warmed by a sun inside you’ll see wonders.

(Romans in the age of the Caesars believed that putting on the right shoe before the left brought prosperity and good luck.)

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

On my right was the Temple of Athena Nike. Twenty-five centuries ago, per my guidebook, it had housed a beautiful frieze of the goddess Athena, thought to be the bringer of “nike,” or victory.