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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"None of us really pushes hard enough. People always talk about playing over your head when you are up against someone really good. Maybe you don't play over your head at all. Maybe it's just potential you never knew you had."
"[David] Mamet is another hypocrite. His idea of Black man is a pimp who abuses women, [Edmond], yet his play Oleanna [1994] ends with a White professor slapping an uppity feminist, at least the version I saw at San Francisco's ACT."
"Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind."
"So when my film career took off, I always felt like I was trying to play catch-up because I hadn't studied acting before. I didn't know how to manage money or my career. When I look back, I think I was a little bit shell-shocked."
"You want to play another kind of character in another genre, and it's been something I've been trying to do if I can in the career so far, and it's something I hope to continue because it's interesting to me and you get to do different things as an actor."
"The life of God - the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things - may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things."
"I don't care who I play to, as long as they enjoy listening to what I play."
"You get to play with people's little danger zones."
"What I want to bring back to superheroes with this project is a sense of play. Things have gotten so dreary. The heroes have gotten so ugly that even their muscles have muscles."
"First of all the criteria that I have that goes into any career decision is whether or not I have the life experience, emotional resources to play the part truthfully or the imagination. Second, would be the director."
"If we don't play God, who will?"
"If that thy fame with ev'ry toy be pos'd, 'Tis a thin web, which poysonous fancies make; But the great souldier's honour was compos'd Of thicker stuf, which would endure a shake. Wisdom picks friends; civility plays the rest; A toy shunn'd cleanly passeth with the best."
"While F.D.R. once told Americans that we have nothing to fear but fear itself, Mr. Ashcroft is delighted to play the part of Fear Itself, an assignment in which he lets his imagination run riot."
"These are the saddest of possible words, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Trio of Bear Cubs fleeter than birds, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a double, Words that are weighty with nothing but trouble, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance. This brief poem, immortalized the Chicago Cubs' double-play combination: Shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance."
"Looking back, I guess I used to play-act all the time. For one thing, it meant I could live in a more interesting world than the one around me."
"Shakespeare is God, of course. I have studied his plays for the vast majority of my sentient life. When I was a kid, my parents found an old copy of the LP recording of Richard Burton in John Gielgud's Broadway production of Hamlet and they gave it to me for my birthday. I listened to it till the grooves wore thin and I was off and running."
"I loved watching Ken Griffey Jr play for the Mariners and when he was trade to the Reds I was especially excited to get the opportunity to watch him play in person."
"I could dance with you till the cows come home. Better still, I'll dance with the cows and you come home." Groucho Marx was never one to pass up an opportunity for a play on words and this occurs in his dialogue of the 1933 film Duck Soup."
"We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm."
"I play piano, by ear. Yes, I write songs... and good ones."
