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A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.
It is an invariable principle of all play, finite and infinite, that whoever plays, plays freely. Whoever must play, cannot play.
The rules of a finite game are the contractual terms by which the players can agree who has won.
Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.
“To believe is to know you believe, and to know you believe is not to believe” (Sartre).
A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public.
Power is always measured in units of comparison.
If I accept death as inevitable, I do not struggle against mortality. I struggle as a mortal.
“We must learn the fine arts of war and independence so that our children can learn architecture and engineering so that their children may learn the fine arts and painting” (John Quincy Adams).
Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.
Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.
Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner’s prize is the defeated opponent.
Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it.
Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer.
“We have to remember that what we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning” (Heisenberg).
MYTH PROVOKES Explanation but accepts none of it. Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.
if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.
