Play quotes
12.5K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside play — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"A true soldier does not argue as he marches, how success is going to be ultimately achieved. But he is confident that if he only plays his humble part well, somehow or other the battle will be won. In is that spirit that every one of us should act. It is not given to us to know the future. But it is given to everyone of us to know how to do our own part well."
"Children inherit the qualities of the parents, no less than their physical features. Environment does play an important part, but the original capital on which a child starts in life is inherited from its ancestors. I have also seen children successfully surmounting the effects of an evil inheritance. That is due to purity being an inherent attribute of the soul."
"If intellect plays a large part in the field of violence, I hold that it plays a larger part in the field of nonviolence."
"My father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it."
"I wanted to get that scholarship to - a division one scholarship and play ball and go to school for free. And that, to me, was - I was always about getting to that next step. If I could get to that next place, then I could figure out essentially what to do with being in that space and how to manage my time and handle those - handle all the benefits of being in that space in a way that would get me to the next place."
"Our fears are an amazing gift of the imagination, a kind of everyday clairvoyance, a way of glimpsing what might be the future when there's still time to influence how that future will play out."
"the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused."
"Stage presence is not something I spend a whole lot of time thinking about. On the one hand, I do, because I have, like, favorite front-people and I know what's excited me to see in a band. But I can't be David Yow [Jesus Lizard frontman] and still play guitar."
"I was ready to get out of the box and play something a little different than what everybody has seen."
"Obama reminds me of the black kid at a white school that don't nobody want to play with."
"Well, I am very happy that I was able to play a part in bringing music from the streets onto the radio and into modern culture, I worked very hard and always believed in the sounds I was creating."
"I knew no one in this business, and the only acting I'd ever done was in a first-grade play. I understood some of my talents - growing up playing piano, and my operatic voice led me to All-State in my first, and only, year of singing - but I didn't yet know all of my capacities. My parents felt helpless, as they knew nothing about this world and couldn't help me in any way except through pure love."
"When I play with people, one of the first rules is to listen. Just by the near fact that you listen and you're open to listening, or you're listening and you're open to what this other person is doing. Also you going to be open to what you're doing and you're not going to have it like 'planned out'."
"I don't care what you play, where you're from, who you produce. It depends on what you're doing when you're with me. That's what counts. I don't pre-judge anything or anybody."
"I make music that I know that people will enjoy, and balance the ideas and philosophy that we put in music with music that when we play it live, people can move to it and groove to it."
"If I'm doing a concert, and I'm having a problem with the audience... I just play a Bob Marley song, and I'm good for the rest of the night."
"To play down mothering as small is to crack the very foundation on which greatness stands."
"You know what I did this morning? I played the voice of a toy. Some terrible robot toys from Japan that changed from one thing to another. The Japanese have funded a full-length animated cartoon about the doings of these toys, which is all bad outer-space stuff. I play a planet. I menace somebody called Something-or-other. Then I'm destroyed. My plan to destroy Whoever-it-is is thwarted and I tear myself apart on the screen."
"I'm not a walking extra in a Chekhov play; I'm no Slavic gloom or Irish gloom. I mark only the happy hours, like the sundial, because otherwise I would have gone nuts."
"I don't like television when it gets near to photographed plays."
