Quotes About Play

"Play energizes us and enlivens us. It eases our burdens. It renews our natural sense of optimism and opens us up to new possibilities." - Stuart Brown, MD

"It is a happy talent to know how to play." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Life must be lived as play." - Plato

"In our play we reveal what kind of people we are."- Ovid

"Play is our brain's favorite way of learning." - Diane Ackerman

"Culture arises and unfolds in and as play." - Johan Huizinga

"Almost all creativity involves purposeful play." - Abraham Maslow

"Whoever wants to understand much must play much." - Gottfried Benn

"Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold." - Joseph Chilton Pearce

"The true object of all human life is play." - G. K. Chesterton

"A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard." - Benjamin Spock

"Play fosters belonging and encourages cooperation." - Stuart Brown, MD

"Play has been man’s most useful preoccupation." - Frank Caplan

"To the art of working well a civilized race would add the art of playing well." - George

"People tend to forget that play is serious." - David Hockney

"Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity." - Kay Redfield Jamison

"Do not…keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play." - Plato

"Deep meaning lies often in childish play." - Johann Friedrich von Schiller

"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play." - Heraclitus

"Children at play are not playing about. Their games should be seen as their most serious minded activity." - Michel de Montaigne

"The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct." - Carl Jung

"In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior. In play it is as though he were a head taller than himself." - Lev Vygotsky

"Creative people are curious, flexible, persistent, and independent with a tremendous spirit of adventure and a love of play." - Henri Matisse

"The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression." - Brian Sutton-Smith

"Play is training for the unexpected." - Marc Bekoff

"Those who play rarely become brittle in the face of stress or lose the healing capacity for humor." - Stuart Brown, MD

"The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable." - Carl Jung

"In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play." - Friedrich Nietzsche

"Play is hard to maintain as you get older. You get less playful. You shouldn’t, of course." - Richard Feynman

"Children have always learned and created places for themselves through play." - Donna R. Barnes

"There is for many a poverty of play." - D.W. Winnicott

"Play allows us to develop alternatives to violence and despair; it helps us learn perseverance and gain optimism." - Stuart Brown MD

"If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society." - Jean Piaget

"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." - Pablo Neruda

"It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self." - D.W. Winnicott

"Now in myth and ritual the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin: law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science. All are rooted in the primeval soil of play." - Johan Huizinga

"Ritual grew up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and dancing were pure play.... We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises in and as play, and never leaves it." - Johan Huizinga

"So, in all these spheres—in painting, sculpture, drawing, music, singing, dancing, gymnastics, games, sports, writing, and speech—we can carry on to our heart’s content, all through our long lives, complex and specialized forms of exploration and experiment." - Desmond Morris

"I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven." - Jesus