Neville Cardus Quotes

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

Neville Cardus

#2. The elements are cricket's presiding geniuses.

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

#6. 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.

Neville Cardus

#7. 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.

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

#9. 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.

Neville Cardus

#10. It is far more than a game, this cricket.

Neville Cardus

#11. 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.

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

#15. 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.

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

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

Neville Cardus

#19. 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.

Neville Cardus