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.

I never yet could make out why men are so fond of hunting; they often hurt themselves, often spoil good horses, and tear up the fields—and all for a hare or a fox or a stag that they could get more easily some other way.

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 true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war.

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.

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

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.

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

Football causeth fighting, brawling, contention, quarrel picking, murder, homicide and great effusion of bloode, as daily experience teacheth.

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

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

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called games.