This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"I'll play it first and tell you what it is later." - Miles Davis, fully Miles Dewey Davis III
"The music has gotten thick. Guys give me tunes and they're full of chords. I can't play them...I think a movement in jazz is beginning away from the conventional string of chords, and a return to emphasis on melodic rather than harmonic variation. There will be fewer chords but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them." - Miles Davis, fully Miles Dewey Davis III
"That was my gift . . . having the ability to put certain guys together that would create a chemistry and then letting them go; letting them play what they knew, and above it." - Miles Davis, fully Miles Dewey Davis III
"Why has there been so great a shift in the attitudes of the public [toward accepting free market ideas]? I’m sorry to confess that I do not believe it occurred because of the persuasive power of such books as Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom or Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged or our own Capitalism and Freedom. Such books certainly played a role, but I believe the major reason for the change is the extraordinary force of factual evidence.…The great hopes that had been placed in Russia and China by the collectivists and socialists turned into ashes.…Similarly, the hopes that were placed in Fabian socialism and the welfare state in Britain or the New Deal in the United States were disappointed. One major government program after another started with the very best aims and with noble objectives and turned out not to deliver the goods.…Ideas played their part. But they played their part not by producing a reaction against the spread of government but by determining the form that that reaction took. The role we play as intellectuals is not to persuade anybody but to keep options open and to provide alternative policies that can be adopted when people decide they have to make a change." - Milton Friedman, fully John Milton Friedman
"The History of Religions is destined to play an important role in contemporary cultural life. This is not only because an understanding of exotic and archaic religions will significantly assist in a cultural dialogue with the representatives of such religions. It is more especially because ... the history of religions will inevitably attain to a deeper knowledge of man. It is on the basis of such knowledge that a new humanism, on a world-wide scale, could develop." - Mircea Eliade
"The history of religions reaches down and makes contact with that which is essentially human: the relation of man to the sacred. The history of religions can play an extremely important role in the crisis we are living through. The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning." - Mircea Eliade
"I am not blind to the shortcomings of our own people. I am not unaware that leaders betray, and sell out, and play false. But this knowledge does not outweigh the fact that my class, the working class, is exploited, driven, fought back with the weapon of starvation, with guns and with venal courts whenever they strike for conditions more human, more civilized for their children, and for their children's children." - Mother Jones, referring to Mary Harris Jones
"Life is an opportunity, benefit from it. Life is beauty, admire it. Life is a dream, realize it. Life is a challenge, meet it. Life is a duty, complete it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a promise, fulfill it. Life is sorrow, overcome it. Life is a song, sing it. Life is a struggle, accept it. Life is a tragedy, confront it. Life is an adventure, dare it. Life is luck, make it. Life is too precious, do not destroy it. Life is life, fight for it." - Mother Teresa, born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu NULL
"Work hard, play hard, change the world." - Motto at Amazon
"Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light — and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau — into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being." - Nadine Gordimer
"Through play children explore, develop and represent learning experiences, which help them to make sense of the world. They practise and build up ideas, concepts and skills. They learn how to control themselves and understand the need for rules. They have opportunities to think creatively and imaginatively, take risks and make mistakes. They can work alone, alongside other children, or cooperate, communicating with them as they rehearse their feelings, investigate and solve problems. They can express fears or re-live anxious experiences in controlled and safe situations." - Nancy Gibbs
"We live in a time of such rapid change and growth of knowledge that only he who is in a fundamental sense a scholar - that is, a person who continues to learn and inquire - can hope to keep pace, let alone play the role of guide." - Nathan Marsh Pusey
"Let's give the world to the children just for one day like a balloon in bright and striking colours to play with let them play singing among the stars let's give the world to the children like a huge apple like a warm loaf of bread at least for one day let them have enough let's give the world to the children at least for one day let the world learn friendship children will get the world from our hands they'll plant immortal trees." - Nâzım Hikmet
"It is easy to lose confidence in our natural ability to raise children. The true techniques for raising children are simple: Be with them, play with them, talk to them. You are not squandering their time no matter what the latest child development books say about "purposeful play" and "cognitive learning skills."" - Neil Kurshan
"Mind you learn your lessons, Pavlusha, don't play the fool and don't get into scrapes, but spare no pain to please your teachers and superiors. So long as you please your superiors it does not matter if you are no good at learning and God has not endowed you with talent: you will still go far and outstrip the others. Do not keep company with your schoolfellows; they will teach you no good; but if you must, then choose those that are richer so that when the occasion arises they may be useful to you. Do not open your purse too freely to others, but rather conduct yourself in such a manner that others will open their freely to you, and, most important, husband your money and save every copeck: of all things in the world, money is the most dependable. A playmate or friend will lead you a merry dance and will be the first to betray you in times of trouble, but a copeck will never betray you, whatever trouble you might be in. With that copeck you can do everything and achieve everything in this world." - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol
"Within a few years a simple and inexpensive device, readily carried about, will enable one to receive on land or sea the principal news, to hear a speech, a lecture, a song or play of a musical instrument, conveyed from any other region of the globe. The invention will also meet the crying need for cheap transmission to great distances, more especially over the oceans. The small working capacity of the cables and the excessive cost of messages are now fatal impediments in the dissemination of intelligence which can only be removed by transmission without wires." - Nikola Tesla
"It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of 'the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e.g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role." - P. F. Strawson, fully Sir Peter Frederick Strawson
"A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who doesn't play has lost forever the child who lived in him and who he will miss terribly." - Pablo Neruda, pen name for Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto
"Our life's a stage, a comedy: either learn to play and take it lightly, or bear its troubles patiently." - Palladas NULL
"A strong man who puts his faith in others, May play with life, But a weakling who is always wary, Escapes death, Even at the hands of the strongest men." - Panchatantra or The Panchatantra NULL
"You may control a mad elephant; You may shut the mouth of the bear and the tiger; Ride the lion and play with the cobra; By alchemy you may learn your livelihood; You may wander through the universe incognito; Make vassals of the gods; be ever youthful; You may walk in water and live in fire; But control of the mind is better and more difficult." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"The entire universe is God's cosmic motion picture, and that individuals are merely actors in the divine play who change roles through reincarnation; mankind's deep suffering is rooted in identifying too closely with one's current role, rather than with the movie's director, or God." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"At times life seems to be a cruel game. The only justification for it is that in reality it is only a dream. That is why there are so many differences in the world. Some people are poor, some are rich, some healthy, some sick, and so on. You have had many experiences through many incarnations and you will have others in future incarnations, but they should not frighten you. You must play all parts in the motion picture of life, inwardly saying: 'I am Spirit.' This is the great consolation that wisdom gives us." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"This show has a purpose: that you learn how to play the various parts of the life movie without identifying your Self with your role. It is important to avoid identification with pain or anger or any kind of mental or physical suffering that comes. The best way to dissociate yourself from your difficulty is to be mentally detached, as if you were merely a spectator, while at the same time seeking a remedy. Don’t expect to attain unalloyed peace and happiness from earthly life. This should be your attitude: no matter what your experiences are, enjoy them in an objective way, as you would a movie." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Unfulfilled desires are the root cause of reincarnation. You don’t have to be a king in order to have complete fulfillment. Nor do you end desires by giving up everything and becoming a poor man. You have your own self-created destiny with its lessons to be learned, and you must play well that part for which you were sent here. If everybody on the stage wants to be a king or queen, there will be no play. An actor with even a minor part can ruin the entire production by a poor performance. Every role is important; everyone should interact harmoniously for the success of the play." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"Pranayama is derived fron two Sanskrit words - prana (life) and ayama (control). Pranayama is therefore life control and not "breath control." The broadest meaning of the word prana is force of energy. In this sense, the universe is filled with prana; all creation is a manifestation of force, a play of force. Everything that was, is, or shall be, is nothing but the different modes of expression of the universal force. The universal prana is thus the Para-Prakiti (pure Nature), immanent energy or force which is derived from the infinite Spirit, and which permeates and sustains the universe." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"When a man in the process of dreaming becomes conscious that he is dreaming, he is no longer identified with the phenomena; he is not affected exultantly or dolefully. God consciously dreams His cosmic play and is unaffected by it's dualities. A yogi who perceives his real self as separate from his active senses and their objects never becomes attached to anything. He is aware of the dream nature of the universe and watches it without being entangled in its complex but ephemeral nature." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
"There’s not a stone or leaf or life that men won’t put a name to. It gives them a nice safe box to collect things in. They get in the habit of collecting things and end up surprised at the weight they’re carrying. A dream they thought might fit someday, something bright and sweet like a woman, picked up for her shine and somehow never left or at least never forgotten. Or an ambition! There’s a fine item in any man’s bag. A great, glowing ambition. They never fade, never wear even when you’ve outgrown them. Always there to look at and remember and play might-have-been." - Parke Godwin
"No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world." - Pat Buchanan, fully Patrick Joseph "Pat" Buchanan
"A good many people find this unpleasant; Einstein has always objected to it. The way he expressed it was: The good God does not play with dice. Schrodinger also did not like the statistical interpretation and tried for many years to find an interpretation involving determinism for his waves. But it was not successful as a general method. " - Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
"I think it is a peculiarity of myself that I like to play about with equations, just looking for beautiful mathematical relations which maybe don’t have any physical meaning at all. Sometimes they do." - Paul Dirac, fully Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac
"Naive falsificationism takes it for granted that the laws of nature are manifest and not hidden beneath disturbances of considerable magnitude. Empiricism takes it for granted that sense experience is a better mirror of the world than pure thought. Praise of argument takes it for granted that the artifices of Reason give better results than the unchecked play of our emotions. Such assumptions may be perfectly plausible and even true. Still, one should occasionally put them to a test. Putting them to a test means that we stop using the methodology associated with them, start doing science in a different way and see what happens." - Paul Feyerabend, fully Paul Karl Feyerabend
"I don’t care how much talent a team has - if the boys don’t think tough, practice tough, and live tough, how can they play tough on Saturday’s?" - Bear Bryant, fully Paul William "Bear" Bryant
"Life attracts life… Life can seem either very long or very short, according to how you live it… Life does not play with marked cards. Winning or losing is part of it… Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once… Life is a constant risk, and anyone who forgets this will be unprepared for the challenges that fate may have in store… Life is a game that is spinning faster to dizziness; life is a skydiving game; it gives us the opportunity, we flying and soaring up again; life is a hiking trip; it wants to climb to the pinnacle of your best and feeling angry, upset when you do not control it… Life is an act of faith… Life is falling down 7 times and getting up 8… Life is like a garden, you reap what you sow… Life is like cooking: before choosing what you love, try everything… Life is made of our attitudes. And there are certain things that the gods oblige us to live through. Their reason for this does not matter, and there is no action we can take to make them pass us by… Life is one long training session, in preparation for what will come. Life and death lose their meaning, there are only challenges to be met with joy and overcome with tranquility… Life is short. Kiss slowly, laugh insanely, love truly and forgive quickly… Life is too short to waste time complaining… Life is the moment we're living right now… Life sometimes separates people so that they can realize how much they mean to each other… Life without cause is a life without effect. " - Paulo Coelho
"It is not possible to remake this country, to democratize it, humanize it, make it serious, as long as we have teenagers killing people for play and offending life, destroying the dream, and making love unviable. If education alone cannot transform society, without it society cannot change either." - Paulo Freire
"Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate'er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Teamwork is neither good nor desirable. It is a fact. Wherever people work together or play together they do so as a team. Which team to use for what purpose is a crucial, difficult and risky decision that is even harder to unmake. Managements have yet to learn how to make it." - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker
"To create music, you have to have violins. You have to have instruments, okay? But the music doesn’t come from the violin. The violin is an instrument. For me, at an experiential level, giving a talk or working with a group in a workshop can be the same. I create that reality in my own consciousness, and then I play the instruments. I just really, really enjoy myself; I kind of fall into my love of the people. And I know, at some level, when I’m doing those programs and things begin to operate this way, nothing can go wrong. No matter what happens, it’s exactly what needs to happen right then. " - Peter Senge, fully Peter Michael Senge
"We will not stand activist judges who legislate from the bench, who remake our culture. ... We will not tolerate judges who change the rules of our written Constitution. You, the American people, play a big part on how to deal with these out-of-control judges. ... The answer is in your hands." - Phyllis Schlafly, fully Phyllis McAlpin Stewart Schlafly
"In general, people have not realized that one can express our very essence through neutral constructive elements; that is to say, we can express the essence of art. The essence of art of course in not often sought. As a rule, individualist human nature is so predominant, that the expression of the essence of art through a rhythm of lines, colors, and relationships appears insufficient. Recently, even a great artist has declared that ‘complete indifference to the subject leads to an incomplete form of art.’ But everybody agrees that art is only a problem of plastics. What good then is a subject? It is to be understand that one would need a subject to expound something named ‘Spiritual riches, human sentiments and thoughts.’ Obviously, all this is individual and needs particular forms. But at the root of these sentiments and thoughts there is one thought and one sentiment: those do not easily define themselves and have no need of analogous forms in which to express themselves. It is here that neutral plastic means are demanded. For pure art then, the subject can never be an additional value, it is the line, the color, and their relations which must ‘bring into play the whole sensual and intellectual register of the inner life…,’ not the subject. Both in abstract art and in naturalistic art color expresses itself ‘in accordance with the form by which it is determined,’ and in all art it is the artists task to make forms and colors living and capable of arousing emotion. If he makes art into an ‘algebraic equation’ that is no argument against the art, it only proves that he is not an artist." - Piet Mondrian, fully Pieter Cornelis "Piet" Mondriaan, after 1906 Mondrian
"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation." - Plato NULL
"The abuse of buying and selling votes crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL
"Life is a puzzle, solve it. Life is a game, play it. Life is a question, answer it. Life is a road, take it. Life is a diary, fill it. Life is an ice cream, enjoy it! Life is an adventure, experience it. Life is a poem, read it. Life is life, live it. " - Pooja Natarajan
"An hour of play discovers more than a year of conversation." - Portuguese Proverbs
"Those of us who decided to work for democracy in Burma made our choice in the conviction that the danger of standing up for basic human rights in a repressive society was preferable to the safety of a quiescent life in servitude. Ours is a nonviolent movement that depends on faith in the human predilection for fair play and compassion." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
"For those who live in urban areas with few businesses of any kind, the impact of changes in the private sector is most direct and devastating, with high unemployment and crime, drug abuse, welfare dependency, and school failure. Problems elsewhere eventually affect us all so government has a big responsibility to help remedy them. But its resources are limited. Other developed countries, like Japan and Germany, are more committed to social stability than we have been, and they tailor their economic policies to maintain it. We have chosen a different path, leaving more of our resources in the private sector. As a society, we have a choice to make. We can permit the marketplace largely to determine the values and well-being of the village, or we can continue, as we have in the past, to expect business to play a social as well as an economic role. That means we have to look realistically at what government must require business to do, principally in the areas of health, safety, the environment [and so on]." - Hillary Rodham Clinton
"Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought. " - Albert Einstein
"God does not play dice with the universe." - Albert Einstein
"Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword." - Buckminster Fuller, fully Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller