What a polite game tennis is. The chief word in it seems to be 'sorry'and admiration of each other's play crosses the net as frequently as the ball.

-Barrie, SirJ(ames) M(atthew)
Quoted in Colin  Jarman The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

To charge all unmerited praise with the guilt of flattery, and to suppose that the encomiast always knows and feels the falsehood of his assertions, issurely to discover great ignorance of human nature and human life. In determinations depending not on rules, but on experience and comparison, judgement is always to some degree subject to affection.Very near to admiration is the wish to admire.

-Johnson, Samuel known as Dr Johnson
^81 Lives of the English Poets,'Halifax'.

Zwei Dinge erfu«  llen das Gemu« t  mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je  o« fter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit besch a« ftigt: der bestirnte Himmel u«  ber mir, unddas moralische Gesetz in mir. Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within.

-Kant, Immanuel
  Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (Critique of Practical Reason) (translated by T K  Abbott).

No physical activity is so vain as boxing. A man gets into the ring to attract admiration. In no sport, therefore, can you be more humiliated.

-Mailer, Norman Kingsley
  The Fight.

Life is too short to waste on the admiration of one man.

-Scott, Rose
Her habitual response to offers of marriage. Quoted in Jennifer Uglow (ed) The Macmillan Dictionary ofWomen's Biography (2nd edn,1989).