"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation."
— Plato

"Have a regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success."
— Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)

"When you play, play hard; when you work, don't play at all."
— Theodore Roosevelt

"Beware the ides of March."
— William Shakespeare

"This is the real secret of life--
to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
— Alan Wilson Watts

"It is a happy talent to know how to play."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Karl Marx: "Religion is the opiate of the masses."

Carrie Fisher "I did masses of opiates religiously."
— Carrie Fisher (Postcards from the Edge)

"[Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives."
— Nancy E. Turner (These Is My Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881-1901 : A Novel)

"What a fool honesty is."
— William Shakespeare (The Winter's Tale)

"Educated men are so impressive."
— William Shakespeare

"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt"
— Alan Wilson Watts (Zen and the Beat Way)

"I pity the fool that never stopped to play and worked his life into the grave"
— D.C. Bussey

"Dance. Dance for the joy and breath of childhood. Dance for all children, including that child who is still somewhere entombed beneath the responsibility and skepticism of adulthood. Embrace the moment before it escapes from our grasp. For the only promise of childhood, of any childhood, is that it will someday end. And in the end, we must ask ourselves what we have given our children to take its place. And is it enough?"
— Richard Paul Evans (The Christmas Box Miracle : My Spiritual Journey of Destiny, Healing and Hope)

"A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both."
— L.P. Jacks

"Kelley. Your name is Kelley, isn't it?" He didn't wait for her confirmation. "Yes. Well. Tell me...that bit just now...was that from Dante's Inferno?"
"Uh...no," Kelley stammered. Her face felt hot.
"Really?"
I'm in for it.
"Are you sure?" he continued. "Because it most certainly wasn't from this play. And it bloody well sounded like hell.""
— Lesley Livingston (Wondrous Strange)

"There is work that is work and there is play that is play; there is play that is work and work that is play. And in only one of these lies happiness."
— Gelett Burgess

"...The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.""
— William Shakespeare (Hamlet)

"Now entertain conjecture of a time,
When creeping murmur and the pouring dark
Fill the wide vessel of the universe...
Chorus Henry V "
— William Shakespeare

"What is a weak pawn? A pawn that is exposed to attack and also difficult to defend is a weak pawn. There are several varieties: isolated, doubled, too advanced, retarded."
— Samuel Reshevsky (Art of Positional Play)

"We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all of Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for a corkscrew?"
— Tom Stoppard (Arcadia: A Play)

"Scots from hogtowns or cowtowns work from cockcrow to moondown -- to chop down woodlots, to plow down cornrows."
— Christian Bök (Eunoia)

"The new light above my table is a great improvement. With all this darkness around me I feel less alone. (Pause.) In a way. (Pause.) I love to get up and move about in it, then back here to... (hesitates) ...me. (Pause.)"
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"I happened to look up and there it was. All over and done with, at last. I sat on for a few moments with the ball in my hand and the dog yelping and pawing at me. (Pause.) Moments. Her moments, my moments (Pause.) The dog's moments."
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"I asked her to look at me and after a few moments - (pause) - after a few moments she did, but the eyes just slits, because of the glare I bent over her to get them in the shadow and they opened. (Pause. Low) Let me in."
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"How do you manage it, she said, at your age? I told her I'd been saving up for her all my life."
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you."
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"I lay down across her with my face in her breasts and my hand on her. We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side.
(Pause. Krapp's lips move. No sound.)
Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited."
— Samuel Beckett (Krapp's Last Tape)

"Henry: I usen't to need anyone, just to myself, stories, there was a great one about an old fellow called Bolton, I never finished it, I never finished any of them, I never finished anything, everything always went on for ever. (Pause.)"
— Samuel Beckett (Embers)

"Ada: And why life? (Pause.) Why life, Henry? (Pause.) Is there anyone about?
Henry: Not a living soul.
Ada: I thought as much. (Pause.) When we longed to have it to ourselves there was always someone. Now that it does not matter the place is deserted."
— Samuel Beckett (Embers)

"I came up stairs into the world, for I was born in a cellar."
— William Congreve

"As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.

The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

" The critic leaves at curtain fall
To find, in starting to review it,
He scarcely saw the play at all
For starting to review it.
"
— E. B. White

"keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but only if you know the difference"
— State of Play

"Know the moment when to work diligently.
Even more important, know the moment when not to work, but to relax
and play instead.
This will not only benefit you immensely, but also will astonish your
friends and competitors.
from Career Success Without a Real Job at Retirement Jobs"
— Ernie Zelinski

"Emily: Do any human beings ever realise life while they live it?--every, every minute?

Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe--they do some."
— Thornton Wilder

"Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite,

and many may achieve genius only through play
"
— William Saroyan