Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“A gardener, whose attention is ever on the spontaneities of nature, acquires the gift of seeing differences, looks always for the merest changes in plant growth, or in the composition of the soil, the emerging populations of insects and earthworms. So will gardeners, as parents, see changes of the smallest subtlety in their children, or as teachers see the signs of an increasing skill, and possibly wisdom, in their students. A garden, a family, a classroom-any place of human gathering whatsoever-will offer no end of variations to be observed, each an arrow pointing toward yet more changes. But these observed changes are not theatrically amusing to genuine gardeners; they dramatically open themselves to a renewed future.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else. Since gardening is a way not of subduing the indifference of nature but of raising one's own spontaneity to respond to the disregarding vagaries and unpredictabilities of nature, we do not look on nature as a sequence of changing scenes but look on ourselves as persons in passage.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“It is in the garden that we discover what travel truly is. We do not journey to a garden but by way of it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“A garden is a place where growth is found. It has its own source of change. One does not bring change to a garden, but comes to a garden prepared for change, and therefore prepared to change. It is possible to deal with growth only out of growth. True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children. The character of one's parenting, if it is genuinely dramatic, must be constantly altered from within as the children change from within. So, too, with teaching, or working with, or loving each other.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Gardeners celebrate variety, unlikeness, spontaneity. They understand that an abundance of styles is in the interest of vitality. The more complex the organic content of the soil, for example-that is, the more numerous its sources of change-the more vigorous its liveliness. Growth promotes growth.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If indifference to nature leads to the machine, the indifference of nature leads to the garden. All culture has the form of gardening: the encouragement of spontaneity in others by way of one's own, the respect of source, and the refusal to convert source into resource.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“There is a logic in the instrumentality of death that leads us to killing the unseen because they are unseen. The crudest spear or sword is raised by an attacker because the independent existence of another cannot be countenanced-because the other cannot be seen as an other. Just as I insist that the condition of our friendship is your unresisting use of the telephone, I will expect the weapon in my hand to function without finding an other that can resist it. Killers can suffer no suggestion that they are living into the open, that their histories are not finished, that their freedom is always a freedom with others, and not over others, that it is not their vision that is limited but what they are viewing.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The inherent hostility of machine-mediated relatedness is nowhere more evident than in the use of the most theatrical machines of all: instruments of war. All weapons are designed to affect others without affecting ourselves, to make others answerable to the technology in our control. Weapons are the equipment of finite games designed in such a way that they do not maximize the play but eliminate it. Weapons are meant not to win contests but to end them. Killers are not victors; they are unopposed competitors, players without a game, living contradictions.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When it is most effective, machinery will have no effect at all.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Thus, the theatricality of machinery: Such movement is but a change of scenes. If effective, the machinery will see to it that we remain untouched by the elements, by other travelers, by those whose towns or lives we are traveling through. We can see without being seen, move without being touched.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We do not go somewhere in a car, but arrive somewhere in a car. Automobiles do not make travel possible, but make it possible for us to move locations without traveling.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Therefore, the importance of reducing time in travel: by arriving as quickly as possible we need not feel as though we had left at all, that neither space nor time can affect us-as though they belong to us, and not we to them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Such travel is not through space foreign to us, but in a space that belongs to us. We do not move from our point of departure, but with our point of departure. To be moved from our living room by an automobile whose upholstered seats differ scarcely at all from those in our living rooms, to an airport waiting room and then to the airplane where we are provided the same sort of furniture, is to have taken our origin with us; it is to have left home without leaving home. To be at home everywhere is to neutralize space.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. Similarly, a radio must cease to exist as equipment and become sound. A perfect radio will draw attention to itself, will make it seem we are in the very presence of the source of its sound. Neither do we watch a movie screen, nor look at television. We look at what is on television, or in the movie, and become annoyed when the equipment intrudes-when the film is unfocused or the picture tube malfunctions.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When we use machines to achieve whatever it is we desire, we cannot have what we desire until we have finished with the machine, until we can rid ourselves of the mechanical means of reaching our intended outcome. The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself, to become silent, invisible, carefree.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The contradiction in our relation to nature is that the more vigorously we attempt to force its agreement with our own designs the more subject we are to its indifference, the more vulnerable to its unseeing forces. The more power we exercise over natural process the more powerless we become before it. In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place. And the desert, of course, is no less natural than the forest.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Our freedom in relation to nature is not the freedom to change nature; it is not the possession of power over natural phenomena. It is the freedom to change ourselves. We are perfectly free to design a culture that will turn on the awareness that vitality cannot be given but only found, that the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Vitality cannot be given, only found.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“True storytellers do not know their own story. What they listen to in their poiesis is the disclosure that wherever there is closure there is the possibility of a new opening, that they do not die at the end, but in the course of play. Neither do they know anyone else's story in its entirety. The primary work of historians is to open all cultural termini, to reveal continuity where we have assumed something has ended, to remind us that no one's life, and no culture, can be known, as one would know a poiema, but only learned, as one would learn a poiesis.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Oedipus has taken the posture of Master Player executing terminal moves-but the moves are not terminal. Oedipus is able to bring nothing to an end. Even the act of blinding himself, meant as a kind of concluding gesture, only brings him to a higher vision. What Oedipus sees is not what the gods have done to him, but what he has done. He learns that what had been limited was his vision, and not what he was viewing. His blinding is an unveiling, and like all unveiling it is self-unveiling. Confronted in the end with nothing but his own genius, Oedipus is finally able to touch. The end of his story is a beginning.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite speakers are Plato's poietai taking their place in the historical. Storytellers enter the historical not when their speaking is full of anecdotes about actual persons, or when they appear as characters in their own tales, but when in their speaking we begin to see the narrative character of our lives. The stories they tell touch us. What we thought was an accidental sequence of experiences suddenly takes the dramatic shape of unresolved narrative.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The contradiction of finite speech is that it must end by being heard. The paradox of infinite speech is that it continues only because it is a way of listening. Finite speech ends with a silence of closure. Infinite speech begins with a disclosure of silence.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Finite speakers come to speech with their voices already trained and rehearsed. They must know what they are doing with the language before they can speak it. Infinite speakers must wait to see what is done with their language by the listeners before they can know what they have said. Infinite speech does not expect the hearer to see what is already known to the speaker, but to share a vision the speaker could not have had without the response of the listener.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore no about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“So close are knowledge and property that they are often thought to be continuous. Those who are entitled to knowledge feel they should be granted property as well, and those who are entitled to property believe a certain knowledge goes with it. Scholars demand higher salaries for their publishable successes; industrialists sit on university boards.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Whoever wins this struggle is privileged with the claim of true knowledge. Knowledge has been arrived at, it is the outcome of this engagement. Its winners have the uncontested power to make certain statements of fact. They are to be listened to. In those areas appropriate to the contests now concluded, winners possess a knowledge that no longer can be challenged.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Explanations succeed only by convincing resistant hearers of their error. If you will not hear my explanations until you are suspicious of your own truths, you will not accept my explanations until you are convinced of your error. Explanation is an antagonistic encounter that succeeds by defeating an opponent. It possesses the same dynamic of resentment found in other finite play. I will press my explanations on you because I need to show that I do not live in the error that I think others think I do.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility