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

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

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.

Idolatry is the mother of all games.

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.

Play, wherein persons of condition, especially ladies, waste so much of their time, is a plain instance to me that men cannot be perfectly idle; they must be doing something, for how else could they sit so many hours toiling at that which generally gives more vexation than delight to people whilst they are actually engaged in it?

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

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.

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

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

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

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.