Play Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Kahlil Gibran

Bob Dylan

Pablo Neruda

Raymond Chandler

Duke Snider

Thornton Wilder

Anthony Bourdain

From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

A child who does not play is not a child, but the man who does not play has lost forever the child who lived in him, and he will certainly miss him.

You had to play the big scene, he said coldly. Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Raymond Chandler

We can escape the commonplace only by manipulating it, controlling it, thrusting it into our dreams or surrendering it to the free play of our subjectivity.

Leaders are not pale reflectors of major social conflicts; they play up some, play down others, ignore still others.

James MacGregor Burns

The conversation topic in my head is not what role I should play; it is whether I am going to play at all,

Jonny Wilkinson

God writes a lot of comedy, Donna; the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny.

Garrison Keillor

It seems strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe's war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose the war to communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable, win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.

Douglas MacArthur

Of all our games, love's play is the only one which threatens to unsettle the soul...

Marguerite Yourcenar

I don't care how good you play, you can find somebody who can beat you, and I don't care how bad you play, you can find somebody you can beat.

Give a critic an inch, he'll write a play.

Life is a moderately good play with a badly written third act.

But Nature cast me for the part she found me best fitted for, and I have had to play it, and must play it till the curtain falls.

How cruelly sweet are the echoes that start
When memory plays an old tune on the heart!

The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.

Sarah Bernhardt

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first choice. That's what makes the jukebox play.

There is a vast difference between games and play. Play is played for fun, but games are deadly serious and you do not play them to enjoy yourself.

Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it's forced. This is axiomatic.

I object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

I think the best thing is being able to play golf competitively for a living. Ever since I was a little boy, that's something I've always wanted to do, and now I get a chance to live out my dreams.

In a great romance, each person basically plays a part that the other really likes.

Elizabeth Ashley

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

All I really need to know about how to live and what to do and how to be, I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sand pile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned. These are the things you already know:

Share everything.
Play Fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.