A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.

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.

Animal companions come into your life for an infinite number of reasons, each one being in service to you, your current life experience, and moreover, your soul's growth and evolution.

Weird people follow you in the streets, you can't sit alone in a restaurant or a cafe and read a book in peace, and I think everybody values those moments of being alone.

There are future lives. It is not necessary to cram everything into this lifetime. You can enjoy this lifetime, go with the flow, and know it will lead you to a better life in your next incarnation.

My life has been a series of emergencies.

The only one you can accurately compare yourself to is you!

The condition of your birth doesn't determine the outcome of your life. This is America.

A lot of people don't know that my father is black

I have found words [in the Bible] for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and my feebleness.

An affirmation is a strong, positive statement that something is already so.

Success is getting to a point where you'd be truly OK with losing everything you have and starting over.