Searching for quotes about Tony Hawk and falling down usually turns up the same five or six lines repeated on every quote site, none of them sourced. Hawk has talked about failure, injuries and setbacks across decades of interviews and his memoir, but the one popular “get back up” line attached to his name has no traceable origin. Here is what is documented, what is only circulating, and how to tell them apart.
Table of Contents
- 1Quotes About Tony Hawk and Falling Down at a Glance
- 2Is There an Authentic Tony Hawk Quote About Falling Down?
- 3What Do Quotes About Tony Hawk and Falling Down Actually Mean?
- 4Reading quotes about Tony Hawk and falling down after a failed trick
- 5When the search is about adversity in general
- 6When the search is about learning
- 7Which Verified Quotes Connect Tony Hawk to Falling and Recovery?
- 8How Can You Tell If a Tony Hawk Falling Quote Is Real?
- 9What Is the Best Way to Share a Fall or Setback Quote?
- 10Frequently Asked Questions
- 11Did Tony Hawk really say a quote about falling down?
- 12What is the popular Tony Hawk quote about falling and getting back up?
- 13Where can I find Tony Hawk’s original words about skateboarding setbacks?
- 14Can I use a motivational fall quote in a presentation or social post?
- 15What is a verified quote from Tony Hawk about learning from mistakes?
- 16Conclusion
Quotes About Tony Hawk and Falling Down at a Glance
Most results for this phrase fall into three groups, and mixing them up is where the misinformation starts.
| Type of line | What it looks like | How to treat it |
|---|---|---|
| Documented Hawk statement | Perseverance, refusing to quit while still able, the decade-long attempt at the 900 | Safe to quote with a source label |
| Contextual Hawk statement | Lines about skating itself, his childhood, and starting over | Accurate, but not about falling specifically |
| Widely circulated line | “It is not how you fall, it is how you get back up” and its many paraphrases | Treat as unattributed until you find a primary source |
| Generic motivation line | “Falling down is a part of life, getting back up is living” | Widely printed, no reliable speaker attached |
| Fan captions and posts | Phrases posted with a skate photo and a Hawk tag | Not quotations unless a dated post or interview proves it |
The distinction matters more than it sounds. Quote aggregators recycle the same lines with a bare em-dash attribution and no context, which is exactly the gap that lets an unverified line travel for years.
Is There an Authentic Tony Hawk Quote About Falling Down?
No verified canonical quotation joins Tony Hawk directly to falling down. Hawk has spoken and written about perseverance, repeated failure and not stopping while he is still physically able to skate, and those are documented. The specific motivational line that search results keep pinning to him has not surfaced in an interview, a book, a press conference or a dated video that anyone can point to.
That is not the same as saying Hawk never talked about crashes. Skateboarding is a sport built on falling, and the sources that do exist describe that openly. The gap is between what he actually said about getting back up and what internet quote mills decided he must have said.
What Do Quotes About Tony Hawk and Falling Down Actually Mean?
Readers land on this phrase with three different questions in mind, and the same string of words answers none of them cleanly until you split them apart.
Reading quotes about Tony Hawk and falling down after a failed trick
For a skater, falling means a bail. You lose the trick, you slide down the transition, you roll away. Reading a “get back up” quote at that moment reads as encouragement from someone who crashed more often than most people have warm-ups. Forum discussion around Hawk’s sayings tends to treat falling as a skill in skateboarding rather than as failure at all.
When the search is about adversity in general
Most searchers are not looking for skateboarding trivia. They failed a job test, a course, a relationship or a season, and they want a short line to hold onto. The Hawk angle is a hook, and the quote is the payload. In that reading, accuracy matters more than usual, because people copy these lines into captions and presentations.
When the search is about learning
The third reading is the most useful one. A decade of failed attempts at one trick is not a failure story, it is a learning story, and Hawk’s own account of nearly abandoning the 900 fits that frame better than any motivational card. The falls were not setbacks to be overcome emotionally. They were information gathered one session at a time.
Which Verified Quotes Connect Tony Hawk to Falling and Recovery?
These are the lines that trace back to a named source rather than to a repost. Context matters with each one, because the interesting part is what was happening around it.
The biggest life lesson is the value of perseverance.
Source: interviews and memoir. This is the line most often cited from him on the general theme of sticking with something. It reads generic until you know that the biggest lesson he names came out of a career where a single trick took roughly ten years to land.
I will not quit skateboarding until I am physically unable.
Source: interviews. Not a poetic line, which is part of why it holds up. It sets the standard at the limit of what his body allows rather than at the point where motivation runs out, which is a different and harder benchmark.
I started skating when I was about 10 years old.
Source: memoir, Hawk. He describes finding a skateboard in an alleyway and working out how to turn it on his own. It is an origin story rather than a line about falling, but it is the foundation the rest sits on.
On the 900, Hawk has spoken plainly about having given up on landing it before he finally did it at the X Games. The framing matters: roughly ten years of repeated non-landing, each one a fall, each session a decision about whether to try again.
His career also included a serious pelvic injury and a concussion period that slowed him down. Those setbacks appear in interviews as practical problems to solve, not as dramatic turning points.
What ties them together is that Hawk describes failure in operational terms. He tried, he failed, he adjusted something small, he went back. There is no documented speech about rising from a fall, because the records show the work instead.
How Can You Tell If a Tony Hawk Falling Quote Is Real?
Five checks catch most of the fake ones before they reach your post.
- Find the primary source. Search the exact wording plus his name and look for the interview, the book, the press conference or the dated post. If nothing turns up outside quote aggregators, treat the line as unverified.
- Check whether independent pages agree on the wording. Sites that copy each other produce identical sentences everywhere. Real quotations vary slightly between sources because they were transcribed by different people.
- Look for a named speaker and a date. A quote with neither is almost always a caption. Skaters have posted thousands of lines over skate photos with a Hawk tag attached.
- Watch for paraphrase dressed as quotation. Sites rewrite a line into a smoother sentence and keep the attribution. If the version you found is noticeably more quotable than the source, you have found a rewrite.
- Cross-check outside the quote category. Search the wording in books, news archives and video transcripts. Genuine lines appear in at least one non-aggregator format.
The test that catches the most: if you cannot name where a line came from, do not let the name Tony Hawk carry the authority. An unattributed line is still a decent line. It just is not his.
What Is the Best Way to Share a Fall or Setback Quote?
Accurate sharing takes about ten seconds more than the careless version, and it is the difference between a quote people admire and a quote they quietly delete.
- Keep the wording exact. Do not tidy a quotation into something punchier. If the sentence runs long, that is the sentence he said.
- Attribute in full the first time. Write Tony Hawk, and add the source type in parentheses: interview, memoir, or the name of the publication. After that, an em-dash attribution is fine.
- Add one line of context. Say what it was about. A perseverance line next to a story about the 900 reads differently from the same line next to a generic caption.
- Label the unattributed ones honestly. Writing “often attributed to Tony Hawk” is more useful to a reader than a confident em-dash that turns out to be wrong.
- For slides and classroom use, put the source on the slide. Anyone in the room may want to check it, and you want them to find it there.
A caption that works keeps the context in the caption rather than burying it. Something along the lines of Hawk on the value of perseverance, said after roughly ten years of failed attempts at one trick, is short enough to read and honest enough to survive a reply.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Tony Hawk really say a quote about falling down?
Not the famous one. Hawk has spoken and written about perseverance, injury and the roughly ten years of failed attempts at the 900, and those are documented in interviews and his memoir. The line usually presented as his quote about falling and getting back up has no traceable interview, book or dated video behind it, so treat it as unattributed.
What is the popular Tony Hawk quote about falling and getting back up?
It is almost always a version of the idea that it is not how you fall that matters, but how you get back up. That wording circulates on quote aggregators and social posts with his name attached and no citation. Closely related paraphrases turn up too, which is a sign the line is being reshaped rather than repeated from one source.
Where can I find Tony Hawk’s original words about skateboarding setbacks?
Start with his memoir, Hawk, and with interview transcripts rather than quote websites. Coverage of his X Games 900, his pelvic injury and his early years skating in San Diego carries direct quotes in news archives and video transcripts. Those sources give you exact wording, a date and a speaker you can cite.
Can I use a motivational fall quote in a presentation or social post?
Yes, as long as you attribute it accurately. Quote the exact wording, name Tony Hawk only if a primary source supports it, and add the source type in parentheses. If the line has no verified origin, label it as widely circulated rather than dropping an em-dash attribution onto it.
What is a verified quote from Tony Hawk about learning from mistakes?
The most frequently cited verified line on that theme is that the biggest life lesson is the value of perseverance, which appears in his interviews and memoir. His account of nearly giving up on the 900 before landing it at the X Games carries the same idea with more detail, since it describes roughly ten years of repeated failure.
Conclusion
Start by checking the wording and the source before you attribute anything to Tony Hawk. His documented lines on perseverance, on not stopping while he is still able, and on the decade it took to land the 900 are worth using, and they hold up better than the anonymous motivational line that search results keep offering.
When that line shows up on a quote card with his name under it, it is internet folklore rather than something he said. The real story about falling is more useful anyway: a sport where everyone crashes, a trick that took ten years, and a career described in practical terms rather than platitudes.
