This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Law and justice play no role in the relations of peoples of unequal strength." - Gustave Le Bon
"These motions everywhere in nature must surely be the circulations of God. The flowing sail, the running stream, the waving tree, the roving wind – whence else their infinite health and freedom? I can see nothing so proper and holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower God has built for us." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
"Virtue... in so far as it is based on internal freedom, contains a positive command for man, namely, that he should bring all his powers and inclinations under his rule (that of reason); and this is a positive precept of command over himself which is additional to the prohibition, namely, that he should not allow himself to be governed by his feelings and inclinations (the duty of apathy); since, unless reason takes the reins of government into its own hands, the feelings and inclinations play the master over the man." - Immanuel Kant
"Did you know, throughout the cosmos they found intelligent life forms that play to play. We are the only ones that play to win. Explains why we have more than our share of losers." - Jane Wagner
"Life is like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism; the way you play it is free will." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty and charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures that we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open. So many people seem to go about their life’s business with their eyes shut. Indeed, they object to other people keeping their eyes open. Unable to lay themselves, they dislike the play of others." - Jawaharlal Nehru
"No media project succeeds based on “good news only” because good news does not trigger our alert system. Anything good indicates a safe space, the quiet background against which events can play out. The enculturated mind is cued to respond to the negative as a point of focus, which largely screens out or ignores a quiet stable base, and, because it sharpens and maintains our alert awareness, we actually begin to look for the negative." - Joseph Chilton Pearce, aka Joe
"Civilizations die from philosophical calm, irony, and the sense of fair play quite as surely as they die of debauchery." - Joseph Wood Krutch
"Evolution... is comprehensible only if we admit that it is dominated by a finality, a precise and distant goal... telefinality orients the march of evolution as a whole and has acted, ever since the appearance of life on earth, as a distant directing force tending to develop a being endowed with a conscience, a spiritually and morally perfect being. To attain this goal, this force acts on the laws of the unorganized world in such a way that the normal play of the second law of thermodynamics is always deflected in the same direction." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
"Life is a score that we play at sight, not merely before we have divined the intentions of the composer, but even before we have mastered our instruments: even worse, a large part of the score has been only roughly indicated, and we must improvise the music for our particular instrument, over long passages. On these terms, the whole operation seems one endless difficulty and frustration; and indeed, were it not for the fact that some of the passages have been played so often by our predecessors that, when we come to them, we seem to recall some of the score and can anticipate the natural sequence of the notes, we might often give up in sheer despair. The wonder is not that so much cacophony appears in our actual individual lives, but that there is any appearance of harmony and progression." - Lewis Mumford
"One should always think of what one is about; when one is learning, one should not think of play; and when one is at play, one should not think of one's learning." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"What we play is life." - Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops
"Our business in life is not to get ahead of other people, but to get ahead of ourselves. To break our own record, to outstrip our yesterdays by todays, to bear our trials more beautifully than we ever dreamed we could, to whip the tempter inside and out as we never whipped him before, to give as we have never given, to do our work with more force and a finer finish than ever, - this is the true idea, - to get ahead of ourselves... to play a better game of life." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"The city as a center where, any day in any year, there may be a fresh encounter with a new talent, a keen mind or a gifted specialist - this is essential to the life of a country. To play this role in our lives a city must have a soul - a university, a great art or music school, a cathedral or a great mosque or temple, a great laboratory or scientific center, as well as the libraries and museums and galleries that bring past and present together. A city must be a place where groups of women and men are seeking and developing the highest things they know." - Margaret Mead
"Play is the exultation of the possible." - Martin Buber
"The world is not divine play, it is divine fate. They that are the world, man, the human person, you and I, has divine meaning. Creation - happens to us, burns into us, changes us, we tremble and swoon, we submit. Creation - we participate in it, we encounter the creator, offer ourselves to Him, helpers and companions." - Martin Buber
"Almost any description of the creative experience...gives experiential accounts which are in important respects analogous with those obtained from people at play." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
"It was long ago observed that `rites of passage’ play a considerable part in the life of religious man. Certainly, the outstanding passage rite is represented by the puberty initiation, passage from one age group to another (from childhood or adolescence to youth). But there is also a passage rite at birth, at marriage, at death, and it could gbe said that each of these cases always involves an initiation, for each of them implies a radical change in ontological and social status." - Mircea Eliade
"If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; be kind anyway. If you are successful, you will win some false friends and true enemies; succeed anyway. If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway. If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway. The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway… You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Free will and determinism, I was told, are like a game of cards. The hand that is dealt you represents determinism. The way you play your hand represents free will." - Norman Cousins
"In our play we reveal what kind of people we are." - Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
"The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things." - Plato NULL
"The soul of the child in his play should be guided to the love of that sort of excellence in which when he grows up to manhood he will have to be perfected." - Plato NULL
"When a man allows music to play upon him and to pour into his soul through the funnel of his ears those sweet and soft and melancholy airs... and his whole life is passed in warbling and the delights of song, in the first stage of the process the passion or spirit which is in him is tempered like iron, and made useful, instead of brittle and useless. But, if he carries on the softening and soothing process, in the next stage he begins to melt and waste, until he has wasted away his spirit and cut out the sinews of his soul." - Plato NULL
"The most important part of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence in which, when he grows to manhood, he will have to be perfected." - Plato NULL
"Sleep takes off the costume of circumstance, arms us with terrible freedom, so that every will rushes to deed. A skillful man reads his dreams for his self-knowledge; yet not the details, but the quality. What part does he play in them - a cheerful, manly part, or a poor, driveling part? However monstrous and grotesque their apparitions, they have a substantial truth." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth. I look upon the simple and child-like virtues of veracity and honesty as the root of all that is sublime in character." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Science is one thing, wisdom is another. Science is an edged tool, with which men play like children, and cut their own fingers. If you look at the results which science has brought in its train, you will find them to consist almost wholly in elements of mischief. See how much belongs to the word 'Explosion' alone, of which the ancients knew nothing. " - Arthur Eddington, fully Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington
"Wisdom rises upon the ruins of folly... He is no wise man that can not play the fool upon occasion." - Thomas Fuller
"The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog
"It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part; the rest are confounded with the multitude." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The behavior of others is not in our direct control. We want others to be friendly and kind to us. The behavior of others is not in our direct control, but our own behavior is. We play a large role in creating the world we live in, especially how others will behave towards us. If you behave towards others in a positive manner, they are likely to reciprocate." - Zelig Pliskin
"Humans think they are smarter than dolphins because we build cars and buildings and start wars etc., and all that dolphins do is swim in the water, eat fish and play around. Dolphins believe that they are smarter for exactly the same reasons. " - Douglas Adams, fully Douglas Noel Adams
"A play is fiction - and fiction is fact distilled into truth. " - Edward Albee, fully Edward Franklin Albee
"Although it is undifferentiated, Brahman is dynamic and creative. From its ultimate 'being' comes the temporary 'becoming' of the manifest world, with its attributes, functions and relationships. The cycles of samsara [individual lifetimes] ... are the lila of Brahman: its play of ceaseless creation and dissolution. In Indian philosophy, absolute reality is the reality of Brahman. The manifest world enjoys but a derived, secondary reality and mistaking it for the real is the illusion of maya... The traditional Eastern conception differs from the view held by most people in the West... [that] reality is material. The things that truly exist are bits or particles of matter... Matter moves about in space, acted on by energy. Energy also enjoys reality (since it acts on matter), but space does not: space is merely the backdrop or the container... and is passive in itself... space is not experienced... it is only the precondition of experience... [this last comment exposes the Western reliance on sensory experience and therefore its entrapment within the illusion of the empirical world or Maya] The view that space is empty and passive, and not even real to boot, is in complete opposition to the view we get from contemporary physics... it is clear that what they describe as the unified vacuum – the seat of all the fields and forces of the physical world – is in fact the primary reality of the universe... What we think of as matter is but the quantised semi-stable bundling of the energies that spring from the vacuum. In the last count matter is but a waveform disturbance in the nearly infinite energy-sea that is the fundamental medium – and hence the primary reality – of this universe, and of all universes that ever existed and will ever exist." - Ervin László
"So we see, to play successfully the game of life, we must train the imaging faculty. A person with an imaging faculty trained to image only good, brings into his life "every righteous desire of his heart" - health, wealth, love, friends, perfect self-expression, his highest ideals." - Florence Scovel Shinn
"Confine yourself to observing and you always miss the point of your life. The object can be stated this way: Live the best life you can. Life is a game whose rules you learn if you leap into it and play it to the hilt. Otherwise, you are caught off balance, continually surprised by the shifting play. Non-players often whine and complain that luck always passes them by. They refuse to see that they can create some of their own luck. " - Frank Herbert, formally Franklin Patrick Herbert, Jr.
"Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood. " - Fred Rogers, "Mister Rogers," born Frederick McFeely Rogers
"Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel!" - Frédéric Chopin, fully Frédéric François Chopin, born Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin
"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." - Georg Hegel, fully Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
"A very strong military posture is vitally necessary today. How long it must continue I am not prepared to estimate, but I am sure that it is too narrow a basis on which to build a dependable, long-enduring peace. The guarantee for a long continued peace will depend on other factors in addition to a moderated military strength, and no less important. Perhaps the most important single factor will be a spiritual regeneration to develop goodwill, faith, and understanding among nations. Economic factors will undoubtedly play an important part. Agreements to secure a balance of power, however disagreeable they may seem, must likewise be considered. And with all these there must be wisdom and the will to act on that wisdom." - George Marshall, fully George Catlett Marshall, Jr.
"After all these years, I am still involved in the process of self-discovery. It's better to explore life and make mistakes than to play it safe. Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life." - Henry Ross Perot
"I can see ... only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen." - H.A.L. Fisher, fully Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher
"A teacher, like a playwright, has an obligation to be interesting or, at least, brief. A play closes when it ceases to interest audiences." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
"Don't play for safety. It's the most dangerous thing in the world." - Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Oxford
"Understanding, then, can lead to love. But the revese is also true. Love brings understanding; the two are reciprocal. So we must listen to understand, but we must also listen to put into play the compassion that the wisdom traditions all enjoin, for it is impossible to love another without hearing that other. If we are to be true to these religions, we must attend to others as deeply and as alertly as we hope that they will attend to us; Thomas Merton made this point by saying that God speaks to us in three places: tin scripture, in our deepest selves, and in the voices of the stranger. We must have the graciousness to receive as well as to give, for there is no greater way to depersonalize another than to speak without also listening." - Huston Smith, fully Huston Cummings Smith
"So the mind, through understanding itself at all its different levels, comes to a state when it is still. And this is not a long, tedious, tiresome, boring process. You know very well what you think and what you feel, if you are at all aware, sensitive to yourself. You do not have to be analysed, dissected, - that is a lazy man's game. But we know, actually inwardly, our own conflicts, and the cause of those conflicts, their significance, what lies behind them. But we don't want to look at it, we don't want to face it. And so, we play around in circles, never coming to the centre." - Jiddu Krishnamurti