Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world: it gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. The picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.