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.

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

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

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.

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

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 gods play games with men as balls.

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.

Idolatry is the mother of all 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.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.