Most thoughtful Americans of today seem to have forgotten how strongly their own and immediate predecessors, Emerson, Hawthorne and Whitman, were still preoccupied with the essence behind things.

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.

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for crisis.

God is willing to help you with the rain if only you can sow your crops.

With endless time, nothing is special. With no loss or sacrifice, we can’t appreciate what we have

There's no such thing as a passive audience.

Jacobean plays, before Shakespeare, were particularly visceral.

The foolishness of faith is the winning ticket in life

You know anything about investigative work?" "Sure. Annoy the people involved until the guilt party tries to make you go away.

We win because we play together as a team.

All stress begins with one negative thought.

don’t mistake a new place for a new you.