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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"Ping-pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the 19th century, and it was called Wiff-waff! And there, I think, you have the difference between us and the rest of the world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner; we looked at it an saw an opportunity to play Wiff-waff."
"Weaknesses and deficiencies . . . play a most important part in all our lives. It is because of them that we need others and others need us. We are not all weak in the same spots, and so we supplement and complete one another, each one making up in himself for the lack in another."
"Live with a purpose, play with a purpose."
"Nothing is done. Everything in the world remains to be done or done over. The greatest picture is not yet painted, the greatest play isn't written, the greatest poem is unsung. There isn't in all the world a perfect railroad, nor a good government, nor a sound law. Physics, mathematics, and especially the most advanced and exact of the sciences are being fundamentally revised. . . Psychology, economics, and sociology are awaiting a Darwin, whose work in turn is awaiting an Einstein."
"Look at children... If they feel angry with someone, they express it, and then it is finished. They can still play with that person the following day."
"A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?"
"If you play with people who are better than you, then you get better."
"The little cares that fretted me, I lost them yesterday Among the fields above the sea, Among the winds at play."
"Governments will always play a huge part in solving big problems. They set public policy and are uniquely able to provide the resources to make sure solutions reach everyone who needs them. They also fund basic research, which is a crucial component of the innovation that improves life for everyone."
"I've ultimately decided that I will not play this NBA season. I'm going to take the remainder of this season, as well as the upcoming off-season, to reassess my situation, spend time with my family and determine if I will play in the 2015-16 season."
"Every gentleman plays billiards, but someone who plays billiards too well, is no gentleman."
"Do the stuff that only you can do. The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can. The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right."
"My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor."
"I therefore take the liberty of proposing for this hypothetical new atom, which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon."
"When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two."
"I'm looking for backing for an unauthorized auto-biography that I am writing. Hopefully, this will sell in such huge numbers that I will be able to sue myself for an extraordinary amount of money and finance the film version in which I will play everybody."
"Ben Affleck (who plays A.J. Frost) and I got to actually go into the neutral buoyancy tank in actual $10 million spacesuits the astronauts wear in outer space, and that was pretty interesting"
"I don't do damsel in distress very well. It's hard for me to play a victim."
"It is odd, but on the infrequent occasions when I have been called upon in a formal place to play the bongo drums, the introducer never seems to find it necessary to mention that I also do theoretical physics."
"I tend to think of action movies as exuberant morality plays in which good triumphs over evil."
