Neville Cardus Quotations

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

The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

It is far more than a game, this cricket.

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.