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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"The question of good and evil remains in irremediable chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality. It is mere mental sport to the disputants, who are captives that play with their chains."
"Play allows us to maintain curiosity while learning."
"Hence the genius of having Ken steer this ship as well. You have to invest these characters with a Shakespearian quality and not in a way that might disengage the audience but in a way that actually lets you play to an audience."
"When you're wearing jeans there's a shift in your center of gravity. A costume like this and a character like this, there's no way to hide. If you try and play him any way sort of modern or normal, you diminish. He's larger than life. He's 150 percent. You've got to go for it all the time. It was just impossible."
"For me, because I've had classical theater training, when people say, "Oh, my god, the play is amazing!," I'll never get to see it because I'm in it."
"If we are to be really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world. We cannot avoid meeting great issues. All that we can determine for ourselves is whether we shall meet them well or ill."
"If we would have our citizens contented and law-abiding, we must not sow the seeds of discontent in childhood by denying children their birthright of play."
"In foreign affairs we must make up our minds that whether we wish it or not, we are a great people and must play a great part in the world. It is not open to us to choose whether we will play that great part or not."
"Image plays a huge part in my music and in my lifestyle."
"I think its more interesting to play a place where no one really knows you, but I think touring is also great."
"The script is the musical score, and everyone has to play off that score. Even I have to interpret it. The producers are there to eliminate obstacles to that interpretation."
"The day was so delightful that I wished one could live slowly as one can play music slowly."
"A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change."
"On the green banks of Shannon, when Sheelah was nigh, No blithe Irish lad was so happy as I, No harp like my own could so cheerily play, And wherever I went was my poor dog Tray."
"A witty and informative professor posits that more authors do not choose titles borrowed from Shakespeare's sonnets and plays for the reason some people claim not to have partners: "All the good ones are taken.""
"To the engineer, all matter in the universe can be placed into one of two categories: (1) things that need to be fixed, and (2) things that will need to be fixed after you've had a few minutes to play with them. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems. Normal people don't understand this concept; they believe that if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Engineers believe that if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet."
"I feel like it's really important for an actor to play different roles so people can see, "Oh, he can play that guy or he can play this guy." You're not just "THAT guy," that cowboy guy, that whatever guy. Then you are limiting yourself."
"If I'm gonna play a character in a movie or if I want to be the lead of a film, you wanna carry the guy, you wanna get the girl, you wanna save the day or the world."
"I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist."
"There are just times when your body and your soul feed into a character and you somehow meet at the point where that character truly lives in you. It happens in plays, in TV, in films."
