Play/games Quotes

I'll play with it first and tell you what it is later.

Bette Davis

When I hear so much impatient and irritable complaint, so much readiness to replace what we have by guardians for us all, those supermen, evoked somewhere from the clouds, whom none have seen and none are ready to name, I lapse into a dream... I see children playing on the grass, ...they are restive and quarrelsome; they cannot agree to any common plan; their play annoys them; it goes poorly. And one says, let us make Jack the master; Jack knows all about it; Jack will tell us what each is to do and we shall all agree. But Jack is like all the rest; Helen is discontented with her part and Henry with his, and soon they fall again into their old state. No, the children must learn to play by themselves; there is no Jack the master. And in the end slowly and with infinite disappointment they do learn a little; they learn to forbear, to reckon with anther, accept a little where they wanted much, to live and let live, to yield when they must yield; perhaps, we may hope, not to take all they can. But the condition is that they shall be willing at least to listen to one another, to get the habit of pooling their wishes. Somehow or other they must do this, if the play is to go on; maybe it will not, but there is no Jack, in or out of the box, who can come to straighten the game.

Judge Learned Hand

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

Samuel Johnson

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

George Bernard Shaw

The last act crowns the play.

John Ruskin

He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.

George Bernard Shaw

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

Oscar Wilde

The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

Oscar Wilde

One of life's primal situations; the game of hide and seek. Oh, the delicious thrill of hiding while the others come looking for you, the delicious terror of being discovered, but what panic when, after a long search, the others abandon you! You mustn't hide too well. You mustn't be too good at the game. The player must never be bigger than the game itself.

Jean Baudrillard

If you're playing a poker game and you look around the table and and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.

Paul Newman

Playing Shakespeare is really tiring. You never get to sit down, unless you're the king.

Josephine Hull

Life isn't all beer and skittles, but beer and skittles, or something better of the same sort, must form a good part of every Englishman's education.

Thomas Hughes

The number of people that will not go to a show they don't want to see is unlimited.

Oscar Hammerstein

If all the year were playing holidays, to sport would be as tedious as to work.

William Shakespeare

A play visibly represents pure existing.

Thornton Wilder

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents.

Eric Hoffer

Games are a compromise between intimacy and keeping intimacy away.

Eric Berne, Games People Play

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.

Friedrich von Schiller

If there is a species which is more maltreated than children, then it must be their toys, which they handle in an incredibly off-hand manner. Toys are thus the end point in that long chain in which all the conditions of despotic high-handedness are in play which enchain beings one to another, from one species to another --cruel divinities to their sacrificial victims, from masters to slaves, from adults to children, and from children to their objects.

Jean Baudrillard

The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.

Frank Moore Colby