Neville Cardus quotes:

Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water.

A true batsman should in most of his strokes tell the truth about himself.

If a German or an Austrian, a Greek or a Bashibazouk, had composed Gerontius, the whole world would have by now admitted its qualities.

The umpire... is like the geyser in the bathroom; we cannot do without it, yet we notice it only when it is out of order.

Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies' hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed.

A snick by Jack Hobbs is a sort of disturbance of a cosmic orderliness.

The laws of cricket tell of the English love of compromise between a particular freedom and a general orderliness, or legality.

There ought to be some other means of reckoning quality in this the best and loveliest of games; the scoreboard is an ass.

Cricket more than any other game is inclined towards sentimentalism and cant.

A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.

Like the British constitution, cricket was not made: it has 'grown'.

The Australian temper is at bottom grim. It is as though the sun has dried up his nature.

Often in this our life do we begin by cursing men and end by loving them. A sense of the common fallibility of all flesh makes us kin. No man is lovable who is invincible.

Dear, lovely game of cricket that can stir us so profoundly, that can lift up our hearts and break them.

In cricket, as in no other game, a great master may well go back to the pavilion scoreless.... In no other game does the law of averages get to work so potently, so mysteriously.

Such reproductions may not interest the reader; but after all, this is my autobiography, not his; he is under no obligation to read further in it; he was under none to begin. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertainment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.

The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses.

We remember not the scores and the results in after years; it is the men who remain in our minds, in our imagination.

It is far more than a game, this cricket.