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

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

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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.

Gambling is the child of avarice, the brother of iniquity, and the father of mischief.

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.

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

A passion for horses, players, and gladiators seems to be the epidemic folly of the times. The child receives it in his mother’s womb; he brings it with him into the world, and in a mind so possessed, what room for science, or any generous purpose?

Hunting is all that’s worth living for—all time is lost what is not spent in hunting—it is like the air we breathe—if we have it not we die—it’s the sport of kings, the image of war without its guilt.

Recreations should be as sauces to your meat, to sharpen your appetite unto the duties of your calling, and not to glut yourselves with them.

The gods play games with men as balls.

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

Play, wherein persons of condition, especially ladies, waste so much of their time, is a plain instance to me that men cannot be perfectly idle; they must be doing something, for how else could they sit so many hours toiling at that which generally gives more vexation than delight to people whilst they are actually engaged in it?