There is a syndrome in sports called ''paralysis by analysis.''
~ Arthur Ashe

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.
~ Roland Barthes

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
~ Ernest Becker

So you wish to conquer in the Olympic games, my friend? And I too, by the Gods, and a fine thing it would be! But first mark the conditions and the consequences, and then set to work. You will have to put yourself under discipline; to eat by rule, to avoid cakes and sweetmeats; to take exercise at the appointed hour whether you like it or no, in cold and heat; to abstain from cold drinks and from wine at your will; in a word, to give yourself over to the trainer as to a physician. Then in the conflict itself you are likely enough to dislocate your wrist or twist your ankle, to swallow a great deal of dust, or to be severely thrashed, and, after all these things, to be defeated.
~ Epictetus

The first thing is to love your sport. Never do it to please someone else. It has to be yours.
~ Peggy Fleming

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor.
~ Ernest Hemingway

Two things only the people anxiously desire, bread and the circus games.
~ Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis)

Unlike any other business in the United States, sports must preserve an illusion of perfect innocence. The mounting of this illusion defines the purpose and accounts for the immense wealth of American sports. It is the ceremony of innocence that the fans pay to see -- not the game or the match or the bout, but the ritual portrayal of a world in which time stops and all hope remains plausible, in which everybody present can recover the blameless expectations of a child, where the forces of light always triumph over the powers of darkness.
~ Lewis H. Lapham

When we lose, I eat. When we win, I eat. I also eat when we're rained out.
~ Tommy Lasorda

Sports should always be fun.
~ Charles Mann

In sports... you play from the time you're eight years old, and then you're done forever.
~ Joe Montana

Sport in the sense of a mass-spectacle, with death to add to the underlying excitement, comes into existence when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to such an extent that it needs at least a vicarious participation in difficult feats of strength or skill or heroism in order to sustain its waning life-sense.
~ Lewis Mumford

People in the States used to think that if girls were good at sports their sexuality would be affected. Being feminine meant being a cheerleader, not being an athlete. The image of women is changing now. You don't have to be pretty for people to come and see you play. At the same time, if you're a good athlete, it doesn't mean you're not a woman.
~ Martina Navratilova

The man loves danger and sport. That is why he loves woman, the most dangerous of all sports.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

In sport, mental imagery is used primarily to help you get the best out of yourself in training and competition. The developing athletes who make the fastest progress and those who ultimately become their best make extensive use of mental imagery. They use it daily as a means of directing what will happen in training, and as a way of pre-experiencing their best competition performances.
~ Terry Orlick

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
~ George Orwell

Sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all.
~ Ouida

Fifty percent of life in the N.B.A. is sex. The other fifty percent is money.
~ Dennis Rodman

Do you know what my favorite part of the game is? The opportunity to play.
~ Mike Singletary

I don't think I can be expected to take seriously any game which takes less than three days to reach its conclusion.
~ Tom Stoppard