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.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

Some lessons are learnt the hard way, but worth it.

Motherhood is a predicament. How to live fully inside of it with any grace?

We have no problems with Jews and highly respect Judaism as a holy religion.

But he knew well enough that any man in the right circumstances could be dehumanised by panic.

Science has taken away our religion.

I have one rule I live by: Only do what you can do. That neans you're never looking outside for what's popular; you're always looking inside for what's true.

Honor and profit lie not all in one sack.

Be as creative in your tactics as you are in your writing. Find what gets your engine going, no matter how peculiar it may seem to others.

It is not the answers you give, but the questions you ask.

They that have voice of lions and act of hares,--are they not monsters?