Selected play quotes

1. I love fools' experiments. I am always making them.

2. Can you turn into a kitty cat?

3. Man is a luxury loving animal. Take away play, fancies, and luxuries, and you will turn man into a dull, sluggish creature, barely energetic enough to obtain a bare subsistence. A society becomes stagnant when its people are too rational or too serious to be tempted by baubles.

4. The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

5. We say that a girl with her doll anticipates the mother. It is more true, perhaps, that most mothers are still but children with playthings.

6. One more thing: don't spend too much time merely reading. The best part of this work is the play, so play and enjoy!

7. Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

8. Toys are not a need people typically think of, but they've got all these kids who have absolutely nothing to do.

9. Eternity is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.

10. If art were to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

11. Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them.

12. I still get wildly enthusiastic about little things... I play with leaves. I skip down the street and run against the wind.

13. It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them.

14. It is utterly false and cruelly arbitrary to put all the play and learning into childhood, all the work into middle age, and all the regrets into old age.

15. If you want an interesting party sometime, combine cocktails and a fresh box of crayons for everyone.

16. A lot of hacking is playing with other people, you know, getting them to do strange things.

17. Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

18. He loves to sit and hear me sing, Then, laughing, sports and plays with me; Then stretches out my golden wing, And mocks my loss of liberty.

19. Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.

20. Mere imagination would indeed be mere trifling; only no imagination is mere.

21. Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.

22. Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

23. Life is earnest, art is gay.

24. Dare to err and to dream. Deep meaning often lies in childish plays.

25. It is not only possible to say a great deal in praise of play; it is really possible to say the highest things in praise of it. It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls.

26. We are most nearly ourselves when we achieve the seriousness of the child at play.

27. There is no room for play in Islam ... It is deadly serious about everything.

28. 'Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline.'

29. I discuss with myself questions of politics, love, taste, or philosophy. I let my mind rove wantonly, give it free rein to follow any idea, wise or mad that may present itself. ... My ideas are my harlots.

30. Coquetry whets the appetite; flirtation depraves it. Coquetry is the thorn that guards the rose-easily trimmed off when once plucked. Flirtation is like the slime on water-plants, making them hard to handle, and when caught, only to be cherished in slimy waters.

31. We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential. Hence the fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.

32. I was such an ugly kid- when I played in the sandbox, the cat kept covering me up.

33. I tried to hang myself with bungee cord. I kept almost dying.

34. Eee-nee-mee-nee-my-nee-moe

35. Father calls me William, sister calls me Will, Mother calls me Willie, but the fellers call me Bill! Mighty glad I ain't a girl-ruther be a boy, Without them sashes, curls, an' things that 's worn by Fauntleroy! Love to chawnk green apples an' go swimmin' in the lake- Hate to take the castor-ile they give for bellyache! 'Most all the time, the whole year round, there ain't no flies on me, But jest 'fore Christmas I'm as good as I kin be!

36. If you'll be my bodyguard I can be your long lost pal I can call you Betty And Betty when you call me You can call me Al.

37. In this playhouse of infinite forms I have had my play, and here have I caught sight of him that is formless. ~ 96

38. Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie, A fly can't bird, but a bird can fly. Ask me a riddle and I reply, Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie.

39. The rules of grammar are crabbed things to many persons... it is important early to instil a taste for the best things into the minds of children, and I cannot see that anything is learned with greater success than what is learned by playing, and this is, in truth, a very harmless kind of fraud, to trick a person into his own profit.

40. There are two kinds of sex, classical and baroque. Classical sex is romantic, profound, serious, emotional, moral, mysterious, spontaneous, abandoned, focused on a particular person, and stereotypically feminine. Baroque sex is pop, playful, funny, experimental, conscious, deliberate, amoral, anonymous, focused on sensation for sensation's sake, and stereotypically masculine. The classical mentality taken to an extreme is sentimental and finally puritanical; the baroque mentality taken to an extreme is pornographic and finally obscene. Ideally, a sexual relation ought to create a satisfying tension between the two modes (a baroque idea, particularly if the tension is ironic) or else blend them so well that the distinction disappears (a classical aspiration).

41. Measure for Measure

42. The Merchant of Venice

43. The Taming of the Shrew

44. Troilus and Cressida

45. All's Well That Ends Well

46. You know what? When you read a book, you're totally lost in your own private world, and society says that's a good and wonderful thing. But if you play a game by yourself, it's this weird, fucked-up, socially damaging activity.

47. Sam I am I am Sam I am Sam Sam I am.

48. Playing 'Bop' is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.

49. We throw sticks at dogs, that's the level we have dogs at. You'd never dream of throwing one for a cat. We throw sticks for dogs, and dogs go, 'Oh, he's dropped his stick! I better go and get that: (mimes chasing after the stick) Saw you dropped your stick there. Thought I'd bring it back: And you hang on: (mimes giving the stick back and follows it with eyes as it's thrown again) Did you see me just bring that back? And then you...you dropped it again? This is very weird I don't know what's going on here (mimes bringing the stick back again) Now hang on to it this time, I don't want to piss about all the time. You think I enjoy this? There you: Don't fucking throw it!!' That's why the third time, when they come back, they won't give it to you, they go, (through clenched teeth) 'No: I won't let you take it!'

50. I was in the park the other day with my nephew. He got on one of the swings and went 'Come on, Uncle Emo! Give me a big push!' So I went over and pushed him with all of my might. But he said 'No, Uncle Emo! I want a big push!' So I went back about 10 feet, ran to him as fast as I could, and pushed him with all of my might. And he still goes 'No, Uncle Emo! I want a really big push!' So I went back 50 feet, ran to him as fast as I could, and pushed him with all of my might! And my nephew still goes 'NO, Uncle Emo! I wanna really, really BIG push!' So I backed up my Chevy...

51. Zweierlei will der echte Mann: Gefahr und Spiel. Deshalb will er das Weib als das gefahrlichste Spielzeug.

52. 'I used to go missing quite a lot... Miss Canada, Miss United Kingdom, Miss World.'

53. Ohh yeah.. I play with Barbies all the time.

54. My work is a game, a very serious game.

55. I try in my prints to testify that we live in a beautiful and orderly world, not in a chaos without norms, even though that is how it sometimes appears. My subjects are also often playful: I cannot refrain from demonstrating the nonsensicalness of some of what we take to be irrefutable certainties. It is, for example, a pleasure to deliberately mix together objects of two and three dimensions, surface and spatial relationships, and to make fun of gravity.

56. To be a child is something one learns, as one learns the names of rivers or the kings of France. Childhood, for a child, is a sort of falseness, woodenness, stoniness, a lesson recited. Many children are aware of this - that is, aware of being children as a special, prosy condition: 'We can't do that! We're children!' Playing children is a long boring game with occasional exciting moments.

57. 'There's no escape from the Acid Drop!'

58. It should be noted that children at play are not playing about; their games should be seen as their most serious-minded activity.

59. The discovery of a toy duck in the soap dish, presumably the property of some former juvenile visitor, contributed not a little to this new and happier frame of mind. What with one thing and another, I hadn't played with toy ducks in my bath for years, and I found the novel experience most invigorating. For the benefit of those interested, I may mention that if you shove the thing under the surface with the sponge and then let it go, it shoots out of the water in a manner calculated to divert the most careworn. Ten minutes of this and I was enabled to return to the bedchamber much more the old merry Bertram.

60. Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

61. They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing; Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees.

62. First there's the children's house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad.

63. I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

64. Even the children of Carmona were divided into two camps, and below the ramparts, among the brushwood and rocks, we battled with stones shouting 'Long live the duke!' and others, 'Down with the tyrant!' We fought viciously, but I was never satisfied with this game - the fallen enemy rose again, the dead came back to life. The day after a battle, victors and vanquished both found themselves unharmed.

65. And because my teeth don't bite, I can take them out dancing I can take my little teeth out and show them a real good time

66. There would be less violence in the world if everyone used hula-hoops

67. Coriolanus

68. Cymbeline