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 gods play games with men as balls.

Courage and grace is a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health.

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

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

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