Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“This does not mean that I can not see what you see. On the contrary, it is because I cannot see what you see that I can see at all. The discovery that you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision is simultaneous with the discovery that I am the center of my own.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Nature has no outline. Imagination has" (Blake).”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“As the geniuses we are, we do not look but see. To look at something is to look at it within its limitations. I look at what is marked off, at what stands apart from other things. But things do not have their own limitations. Nothing limits itself. The sea gulls circling on the invisible currents, the cat on my desk, the siren of a distant ambulance are not somehow distinct from the environment; they are the environment. To look at them I must look for what I take them to be. I was not looking at the sea gulls as though it was the sea gulls who happened to be there-I was looking for something to make this example. I might have seen them as a sign that land is not far, or that the sea is not far; I could have been looking for a form to reproduce on a canvas or in a poem. To look at is to look for. It is to bring the limitations with us.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality. A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision. It is a field of vision, however, that is recognized as a field of vision only when we see that it includes within itself the original centers of other fields of vision.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The paradox of genius exposes us directly to the dynamic of open reciprocity, for if you are the genius of what you say to me, I am the genius of what I hear you say. What you say originally I can hear only originally. As you surrender the sound on your lips, I surrender the sound in my ear. Each of us has relinquished to the other what has been relinquished to the other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since being your own genius is dramatic, it has all the paradox of infinite play. You can have what you have only by releasing it to others. The sounds of the words you speak may lie on your own lips, but if you do not relinquish them entirely to a listener they never become words, and you say nothing at all. The words die with the sound. Spoken to me, your words become mine do with as I please. As the genius of your words, you lose all authority over them. So too with thoughts. However you consider them your own, you cannot think the thoughts themselves, but only what they are about. You cannot think thoughts any more than you act actions. If you do not truly speak the words that reside entirely in their own sound, neither can you think that which remains thought or can be translated back into thought. In thinking you cast thoughts beyond themselves, surrendering them to that which they cannot be.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When I forsake my genius and speak to you as though I were another, I also speak to you as someone you are not and somewhere you are not. I address you as audience, and do not expect you to respond as the genius you are.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Freedom of speech is a foundation of democracy, because without it citizens can't share their observations on folly and injustice or collectively challenge the authority that maintains them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Poets cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die; it kills.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making (poiesis) of the real and is concrete. Whenever what is made (poiema) is separated from the maker (poietes), it becomes metaphysical. As it stands there, and as the voice of the poietes is no longer listened to, the poiema is an object to be studied, not an act to be learned. One cannot learn an object, but only the poiesis, or the act of creating objects. To separate the poiema from poiesis, the created object from the creative act, is the essence of the theatrical.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We must remind ourselves, to be sure, that Plato was himself an artist, a poietes. His Republic was an invention. So were the theory of forms and the idea of the Good. Since all veiling is self-veiling, we cannot help but think that behind the rational metaphysician, philosophy's great Master Player, stood Plato the poet, fully aware that the entire opus was an act of play, an invitation to readers not to produce the truth but to take his inventions into their own play, establishing the continuity of his art by changing it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Who must play, cannot play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games

“Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games