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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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