Arnold Haultain

"In almost all other games you pit yourself against a mortal foe; in golf it is yourself against the world: no human being stays your progress as you drive your ball over the face of the globe."

"Most of the difficulties in golf are mental, not physical; are subjective, not objective; are the created phantasms of the mind, not the veritable realities of the course."

"Golf is a game in which attitude of mind counts for incomparably more than mightiness of muscle."

"It is not a wrestle with Bogey; it is not a struggle with your mortal foe; it is a physiological, psychological, and moral fight with yourself; it is a test of mastery over self; and the ultimate and irreducible element of the game is to determine which of the players is the more worthy combatant."

"Golf is more exacting than a a steeple-chase or the half-mile."

"There are more "Don't's" in golf than there are in any other avocation in life."

"Don't worry about your caddie. He may be an irritating little wretch; but for eighteen holes he is your caddie."

"Golf is more exacting than racing, cards, speculation, or matrimony."

"Golf gives no margin: either you win or you fail. You cannot hedge; you cannot bluff; you cannot give a stop-order; you cannot jilt. One chance is given you, and you hit or miss. There is nothing more rigid in life. And it is just this ultra and extreme rigidity that makes golf so intensely interesting."

"A man to whom a woman cannot look up, she cannot love. Yet, It is marvelous how a woman contrives to find something to look up to in a man."

"Woman is a species of which every woman is a variety."

"For woman's chief want is to feel that she is wanted. Therefore it is that With women, cruelty is more easily borne than coldness. Indeed, It is astonishing how much downright cruelty a woman will stand from the man she loves or has loved."

"What women admire is a subtle combination of forcefulness and gentleness. If a woman has to choose between forcefulness and gentleness, always she will sacrifice the latter."

"All women are rivals."

"A woman can say more in a sigh than a man can say in a sermon."

"A wounded love carries a scar to the grave."

"It often gives a lady a pleasure to give her lover a pang."

"A man imagines he wins by strenuous assault. The woman knows the victory was due to surrender."

"More women are wooed for their complexions than for their characters."

"Widows rarely choose unwisely!"

"Nature's lessons are hard to learn. Harder still is it to translate Nature's lessons to others. Besides, the appeal of Nature is to the Emotions; and words are weak things (save in the hands of a great Poet) by which to convey or to evoke emotion. Words seem to be the vehicles rather of ratiocination than of emotion. ... If, in these pages, there are scattered speculations semi-mystical, semi-intelligible, perhaps even transcending the boundaries of rigid logic, I must simply aver that I put in writing that only which was given me to say."

"Never have I though so much, ever have I realized my own existence so much, been so much alive, been so much myself if may so say, as in those journeys which I have made alone and afoot. Walking has something in it which animates and heightens my ideas: I can scarcely think when I stay in one place; my body must be set a-going if my mind is to work."

"Those who think their God has revealed himself in the Canonical Books will go to their Bible; those who think he has chosen the channel of a Church will derive ghostly strength from their spiritual counsellors; but those who think the Nameless has nowhere so plainly shown himself as in his works, will seek in the face and lineaments of Nature that consoling smile which every lonely soul so miserably craves; and fortunate it is that not over his works, but only over his words, theologians so wrathfully wrangle."

"Go thou to Pan; betake thee to the fields; betake thee to the woods; pour out thy contrite heart at the altar of the universe, and thou shalt be comforted. ... Lay thy tired head on Nature's breast. ... Always there is at hand the Infinite and the Eternal: about thee, above thee, in presence of which the petty and the paltry flee away."

"Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great pæan of Being that Nature chants. ... Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines—these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life, of Life singing its cosmic song, unmindful who may hear.—Alas, that so few hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!"