Archive

Quotes

One great reason why many children abandon themselves wholly to silly sports and trifle away all their time insipidly is because they have found their curiosity baulked and their inquiries neglected.

—John Locke, 1693

The gods play games with men as balls.

—Plautus, c. 200 BC

A win always seems shallow: it is the loss that is so profound and suggests nasty infinities.

—E.M. Forster, 1919

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

—Novatian, c. 255

Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.

—Juvenal, c. 121

Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

—Marlene Dietrich, 1962

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1838

We cannot say what the woman might be physically, if the girl were not allowed all the freedom of the boy in romping, climbing, swimming, playing whoop and ball.

—Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1848

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of a gun.

—P.G. Wodehouse, 1929

These useless men ought to be cut up and served at a banquet. I really believe that athletes have less intelligence than swine.

—Dio Chrysostom, c. 95

The whole secret of fencing consists but in two things, to give and not to receive.

—Molière, 1670

Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.

—Bion of Smyrna, c. 100 BC

A brilliant boxing match, quicksilver in its motions, transpiring far more rapidly than the mind can absorb, can have the power that Emily Dickinson attributed to great poetry: you know it’s great when it takes the top of your head off.

—Joyce Carol Oates, 1987