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.

The gods play games with men as balls.

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

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.