Play quotes
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside play — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Phronimos, possessing practical wisdom . But the only virtue special to a ruler is practical wisdom; all the others must be possessed, so it seems, both by rulers and ruled. The virtue of a person being ruled is not practical wisdom but correct opinion; he is rather like a person who makes the pipes, while the ruler is the one who can play them."
"One kind of justice is that which is manifested in distributions of honour or money or the other things that fall to be divided among those who have a share in the constitution ... and another kind is that which plays a rectifying part in transactions."
"Reading the play at home, however fulfilling, can never be the vivacious experience that Shakespeare intended."
"So somehow, things that seem extraneous to the play in reality are not. The scene lasts 37 minutes, and you only need 12 minutes of that for the plot. But if you pull the rest of it out, it's not my play."
"Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history."
"Most of my comedy is accidental, I would say. If I don't know what the joke is, I'm going to play it better than if I do."
"I think now that the great thing is not so much the formulation of an answer for myself, for the theatre, or the play - but rather the most accurate possible statement of the problem."
"One plays at being immortal and after a few weeks one doesn't even know whether or not one can hang on till the next day."
"Whenever our neighbour's house is on fire, it cannot be amiss for the engines to play a little on our own."
"The audience is not the least important actor in the play and if it will not do its allotted share the play falls to pieces."
"The essential fault of surrealism is that it invents without discovering. To make a clam play an accordion is to invent not to discover. The observation of the unconscious, so far as it can be observed, should reveal things of which we have previously been unconscious, not the familiar things of which we have been conscious plus imagination."
"The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life."
"Don't be lazy. Learn your instrument and the kids should be learning that stuff. We have to get back to the musicianship of the music. It's called music, so at some point somebody has to learn how to play an instrument."
"When I play on my fiddle in Dooney Folk dance like a wave on the sea."
"My study is a converted garage which is largely lined with bookshelves and cardboard boxes filled with manuscripts of my film scripts, plays and books."
"What originally established the band was cover songs like Not Fade Away. Then, later on, we got more well-known ones like Satisfaction, which you might say echoed the thinking of, well, any generation you care to name, including the present one. But we didn't set out on bits of paper that we were going to be the voice of a generation. The original aim of the Rolling Stones was to play blues. It wasn't even to play rock music."
"Delivers in such apt and gracious words that aged ears play truant at his tales; And younger hearings are quite ravished; So sweet and voluble is his discourse."
"Rumour is a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it."
"If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue."
"Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me."
