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.

If I played in New York, they’d name a candy bar after me.

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

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

I do love cricket—it’s so very English.

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

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?

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.

If I lose at play, I blaspheme, and if my fellow loses, he blasphemes. So that God is always sure to be the loser.

The sadness of the end of a career of an older athlete, with the betrayal of his body, is mirrored in the rest of us. Consciously or not, we know: there, soon, go I.

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

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.