A crude mind could easily think: something is valid, therefore it is true.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

It's just hard, " Harry said finally, in a low voice, "to realize he won't write me again

Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.

I have to tell them that last night was a shameful train wreck filled with blind cuddly puppies.

I ain't a thug - how much Tupac in you you got?

I long ago discovered that you can't TELL about Pollyanna. The minute you try to, she sounds priggish and preachy, and--impossible. Yet you and I know she is anything but that.

If you don't make a total commitment to whatever you are doing, then you start looking to bail out the first time the boat starts leaking.

I always wanted to be a lawyer,but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.

It is not often that any man can have so much knowledge of another, as is necessary to make instruction useful.

The demeaning of dignity is almost the only reason for a fight.

I'm more focused and have a greater sense of challenge, because I constantly feel the weight of time.