A superstition which pretends to be scientific creates a much greater confusion of thought than one which contents itself with simple popular practices.

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.

Success becomes evident when the principles that bring about success are obeyed!

As soon seek roses in December, ice in June, Hope constancy in wind, or corn in chaffBelieve a woman or an epitaphOr any other thing that’s falseBefore you trust in critics.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

More things in politics happen by accident or exhaustion than happen by conspiracy.

Teachers are directed to instruct their pupils... and to awaken in them a sense of their responsibility toward the community of the nation.

In writing songs, I've learned as much from Cezanne as I have from Woody Guthrie.

Answerless questions can destroy you. Move on.

Don't chase the paper, chase the dream.

My mind was formed by studying philosophy, Plato and that sort of thing.