{
  "type": "topic",
  "site": {
    "name": "Leafy Quotes",
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  "formats": "Every page has two versions with the same data: JSON (the page address + .json) and markdown (the page address + .md). Append .json or .md to any `url` in this document.",
  "name": "play",
  "slug": "play",
  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/topics/play",
  "heading": "Quotes about play",
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      "slug": "man-invented-civilization",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/george-r-stewart/earth-abides/man-invented-civilization",
      "text": "Man invented civilization, and was inordinately proud of it. But in no way did civilization change life more than by sharpening the line between work and play, and at last that division came to be more important than the old one between sleeping and waking. Sleep came to be thought a kind of relaxation, and “sleeping on the job” a heinous sin. The turning out of the light and the ringing of the alarm clock were not so much the symbols of man’s dual life as were the punching of the time clock and the blowing of the whistle. Men marched on picket lines and threw bricks and exploded dynamite to shift an hour from one classification to the other, and other men fought equally hard to prevent them. And always work became more laborious and odious, and play grew more artificial and febrile.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "George R. Stewart",
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      "slug": "ones-whole-life",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/john-j-mcneill/taking-a-chance-on-god/ones-whole-life",
      "text": "One's whole life can be caught up in this attitude with the result that the quality of life is destroyed. The high-school student waits for graduation; the college student waits for graduate school; the graduate student waits for a job; the worker waits for a vacation; the vacationer waits to go back to work; the veteran worker waits for retirement. Our whole life can be spent waiting for what comes next. Then death intervenes and in a way it can be said that we never really existed, because we never found time to do something for its own sake; that is to say, we never played.",
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        "name": "John J. McNeill",
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        "title": "Taking a Chance on God",
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      "slug": "mammals-of-every",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/daniel-suarez/daemon/mammals-of-every",
      "text": "\"Mammals of every species indulge in play. Games are Nature's way of preparing us to face difficult realities.\"",
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      "slug": "by-knowing-yourself",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/eckhart-tolle/stillness-speaks/by-knowing-yourself",
      "text": "By knowing yourself as the awareness in which phenomenal existence happens, you become free of dependency on phenomena and free of self seeking in situations, places, and conditions. In other words, what happens or doesn't happen is not that important anymore. Things lose their heaviness, their seriousness. A playfulness comes into your life. You recognize this world as a cosmic dance, the dance of form. (Ch 5)",
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      "author": {
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/iain-m-banks/the-player-of-games/all-reality-is-a-game",
      "text": "All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains malleable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of its rules.",
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      "text": "For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi's imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. (five: FIFTEEN YEARS BEFORE: THE DAY OF ALEF)",
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      "text": "\"There's too little pleasant in this nasty dying world. We all need to remember how to play, how to be children together for a little while.\" (Gadi, twenty-eight: HOW CAN WE TELL THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE?)",
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      "text": "There are no rules. We do whatever seems the most fun.",
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      "text": "The great irony of god games is that letting go is the only way to win.",
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      "text": "That play of black upon white, white upon black, has the intent and takes the form of creative art. It has in it a flow of the spirit and a harmony of music. Everything is lost when suddenly a false note is struck, or one party in a duet suddenly launches forth on an eccentric flight of his own. A masterpiece of a game can be ruined by insensitivity to the feelings of an adversary.",
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      "text": "From the way of Go, the beauty of Japan and the Orient had fled. Everything had become science and regulation. The road to advancement in rank, which controlled the life of a player, had become a meticulous point system. One conducted the battle only to win, and there was no margin for remembering the dignity and the fragrance of Go as an art.",
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      "text": "Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?",
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      "text": "What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.",
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      "text": "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny \"failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions\". In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.",
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      "text": "Piety, then, needs a counterpoise, something to prevent it from being exercised in an excessively rigid way; and this it has, in most intellectual temperaments, in the quality I would call playfulness. We speak of the play of the mind; and certainly the intellectual relishes the play of the mind for its own sake, and finds in it one of the major values in life. What one thinks of here is the element of sheer delight in intellectual activity. Seen in this guise, intellect may be taken as the healthy animal spirits of the mind, which come into exercise when the surplus of mental energies is released from the tasks required for utility and mere survival. “Man is perfectly human,” said Schiller, “only when he plays.” And it is this awareness of an available surplus beyond the requirements of mere existence that his maxim conveys to us. Veblen spoke often of the intellectual faculty as “idle curiosity”—but this is a misnomer in so far as the curiosity of the playful mind is inordinately restless and active. This very restlessness and activity gives a distinctive cast to its view of truth and its discontent with dogmas.",
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      "text": "In using the terms play and playfulness, I do not intend to suggest any lack of seriousness; quite the contrary. Anyone who has watched children, or adults, at play will recognize that there is no contradiction between play and seriousness, and that some forms of play induce a measure of grave concentration not so readily called forth by work.",
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      "text": "Aside from earning their livings, what did your people do, mostly? Games. Sports. Casinos. Loud machines that went fast. Shopping. Lawsuits blaming other for whatever went wrong. What did they believe in? Conspiracy theories. Racial superiority. Heroes with superpowers. Faith healers. God-loves-you religions. State-supported lotteries. All that enormous energy expended to conquer nothing at all, stadia full of people watching no conquering going on. For every scientist or person in government who really tried to conquer, there were a thousand people buying lottery tickets, drinking beer, watching football, and growing old.",
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      "text": "Their act was fine as it was, but as Sizzy said, mere titillation was limited by both prurience and credulity, while entertainment had no boundaries. “If you entertain people well enough, they don’t care you’re a fake,” said Aunt Sizzy. “Most people don’t give a damn about the truth, anyhow.” She mentioned some politicians, including a recent president, as examples. “The world’s biggest phonies, not very bright, but they entertained people, so nobody cared.”",
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      "text": "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.",
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      "text": "I want to assure you that regardless of your circumstances, age, or sex, you can indeed start over, re-arousing from within yourself those earlier, more innocent expectations, feelings and beliefs. It is much better if you can imagine this endeavor more in the light of children’s play, in fact, rather than think of it as a deadly serious adult pursuit.",
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      "text": "Play makes a human being! Work just means you don’t have to feel guilty about playing, which I don’t feel much anyway. Mainly work means I don’t have to suffer the taunts of my friends who wonder why I’m playing as hard as I do!",
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      "text": "Entertainment and learning are not opposites; entertainment may be the most effective mode of learning.",
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      "text": "I just want always to be a little boy and have fun.",
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      "text": "During childhood, they played games with fierce intensity, giving themselves as sacrifice to the game, for play was the chief business of growth, finding and making themselves in the world. Now when they are too old merely to play, to what shall they give themselves with fierce intensity? They cannot play for recreation, since they have not been used up. … Since each activity is not interesting to begin with, its value does not deepen and it does not bear much repetition. … In these circumstances, the inevitable tendency is to raise the ante of the compulsive useless activity.",
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      "text": "There is nothing serious in civil life except good and evil, vice and virtue. Everything else in it should be a game.",
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      "text": "Sometimes it's great fun to be silly, like children playing statues and dying of laughter. And sometimes being silly breaks the even pace and lets you get a new start.",
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      "text": "Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.",
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      "text": "I love such mirth as does not make friends ashamed to look upon one another next morning.",
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      "text": "Boys and girls have many games in common, and this is as it should be; do they not play together when they are grown up? They have also special tastes of their own. Boys want movement and noise, drums, tops, toy-carts; girls prefer things which appeal to the eye, and can be used for dressing-up—mirrors, jewellery, finery, and specially dolls. The doll is the girl's special plaything; this shows her instinctive bent towards her life's work. The art of pleasing finds its physical basis in personal adornment, and this physical side of the art is the only one which the child can cultivate. Here is a little girl busy all day with her doll; she is always changing its clothes, dressing and undressing it, trying new combinations of trimmings well or ill matched; her fingers are clumsy, her taste is crude, but there is no mistaking her bent; in this endless occupation time flies unheeded, the hours slip away unnoticed, even meals are forgotten. She is more eager for adornment than for food. \"But she is dressing her doll, not herself,\" you will say. Just so; she sees her doll, she cannot see herself; she cannot do anything for herself, she has neither the training, nor the talent, nor the strength; as yet she herself is nothing, she is engrossed in her doll and all her coquetry is devoted to it. This will not always be so; in due time she will be her own doll.",
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      "author": {
        "name": "Jean Jacques Rousseau",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/jean-jacques-rousseau/emile-or-on-education/hold-childhood-in-reverence",
      "text": "Hold childhood in reverence, and do not be in any hurry to judge it for good or ill. Leave exceptional cases to show themselves, let their qualities be tested and confirmed, before special methods are adopted. Give nature time to work before you take over her business, lest you interfere with her dealings. You assert that you know the value of time and are afraid to waste it. You fail to perceive that it is a greater waste of time to use it ill than to do nothing, and that a child ill taught is further from virtue than a child who has learnt nothing at all. You are afraid to see him spending his early years doing nothing. What! is it nothing to be happy, nothing to run and jump all day? He will never be so busy again all his life long. Plato, in his Republic, which is considered so stern, teaches the children only through festivals, games, songs, and amusements. It seems as if he had accomplished his purpose when he had taught them to be happy; and Seneca, speaking of the Roman lads in olden days, says, \"They were always on their feet, they were never taught anything which kept them sitting.\" Were they any the worse for it in manhood? Do not be afraid, therefore, of this so-called idleness. What would you think of a man who refused to sleep lest he should waste part of his life? You would say, \"He is mad; he is not enjoying his life, he is robbing himself of part of it; to avoid sleep he is hastening his death.\" Remember that these two cases are alike, and that childhood is the sleep of reason.",
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      "text": "People always play carelessly in games where there is no danger. A falling kite hurts nobody, but nothing makes the arm so supple as protecting the head, nothing makes the sight so accurate as having to guard the eye. To dash from one end of the room to another, to judge the rebound of a ball before it touches the ground, to return it with strength and accuracy, such games are not so much sports fit for a man, as sports fit to make a man of him.",
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      "text": "The sports of the young savage involve long fasting, blows, burns, and fatigue of every kind, a proof that even pain has a charm of its own, which may remove its bitterness.",
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      "text": "We can do nothing simply, not even for our children. Toys of silver, gold, coral, cut crystal, rattles of every price and kind; what vain and useless appliances. Away with them all! Let us have no corals or rattles; a small branch of a tree with its leaves and fruit, a stick of liquorice which he may suck and chew, will amuse him as well as these splendid trifles, and they will have this advantage at least, he will not be brought up to luxury from his birth.",
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      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/william-somerset-maugham/christmas-holiday/arent-you-missing",
      "text": "\"Aren't you missing a lot of fun? You know, one's young for such a little while.\"",
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      "author": {
        "name": "William Somerset Maugham",
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