Play Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

Michel de Montaigne

It is with books as with men; a very small number play a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.

O no, thy love though much, is not so great, It is my love that keeps mine eye awake, Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat, To play the watchman ever for thy sake. For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere, From me far off, with others all too near.

William Shakespeare

[Some] there be that can pack the cards and yet cannot play well; so there are some that are good in canvasses and factions, that are otherwise weak men.

Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

George Bernard Shaw

Everyone's childhood plays itself out. No wonder no one knows the other or can completely understand. By this I don't know if I'm just giving up with this conclusion or resigning myself - or maybe for the first time connecting with reality. How do we know the pain or another's earlier years, let alone all that he drags with him since along the way at best a lot of leeway is needed for the other - yet how much is unhealthy for one to bear. I think to love bravely is the best and accept - as much as one can bear.

Some play the piano well and some badly and there is a great difference in the melodies they produce.

It is vain to recount further the catalogue of miseries. In earlier ages such horrors remain unknown because unrecorded. Just enough flickering light plays upon this infernal scene to give us the sense of its utter desolation and hopeless wretchedness and cruelty.

Winston Churchill

There is health in table talk and nursery play. We must wear old shoes and have aunts and cousins.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is my duty to warn you that it will be used against you, cried the Inspector, with the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.

Arthur Conan Doyle

Let me, in closing, put my position in a nutshell. When I say that I am for the square deal, I mean not merely that I stand for fair play under the present rules of the game, but that I stand for having these rules changed so as to work for a more substantial equality of opportunity and of reward for equally good service. So far as possible, the reward should be based upon service; and this necessarily implies that where a man renders us service in return for the fortune he receives, he has the right to receive it only on terms just to the whole people.

Theodore Roosevelt

Who could doubt that sport is a crucial window for the propagation of fair play and justice? After all, fair play is a value that is essential to sport.

Thou hast it now: King, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised; and, I fear,
Thou play'dst most foully for't.

William Shakespeare

If a sect arises whose tenets would subvert morals, good sense has fair play and reasons and laughs it out of doors without suffering the State to be troubled with it.

Thomas Jefferson

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,
The hart ungalled play;
For some must watch, while some must sleep:
So runs the world away.

William Shakespeare

Habits and customs are a convenience devised for the support of timid natures who dare not allow their souls free play.

Some play at chess, some at cards, some at the Stock Exchange. I prefer to play at Cause and Effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

City's just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

I did a bond tour during the Second World War... We were raising money, and we played Boston and Philadelphia and most of the big cities. And we got to Minneapolis. There wasn't any big theater to play there, so we did our show in a railroad station. Then I told the audience that I knew a girl in Minneapolis. She was also known in St. Paul, she used to come over to visit me. She was known as "The Tail Of Two Cities." I didn't sell any more bonds, but eh... they didn't allow me to appear anymore.

The intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all.

The Army (considering the irritable state it is in, its suffering and composition) is a dangerous instrument to play with.

George Washington

Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him?

Passion surging past control
Plays the god to each one's soul.

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down.