Finite and Infinite Games Quotes

“True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through it for patterns of repetition. Historians sometimes speak of trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing that each observed history is always of others and never of themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself historical.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a poiesis.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Our attempt to take control of nature, to be Master Player in our opposition to it, is an attempt to rid ourselves of language. It is the refusal to accept nature as "nature." It is to deafen ourselves to metaphor, and to make nature into something so familiar it is essentially an extension of our willing and speaking. What the hunter kills is not the deer, but the metaphor of the deer-the "deer." Killing the deer is not an act against nature; it is an act against language. to kill is to impose a silence that remains a silence. It is the reduction of an unpredictable vitality to a predictable mass, the transformation of the remote into the familiar. It is to rid oneself of the need to attend to its otherness.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The unspeakability of nature is the very possibility of language.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about. This means that we can never have the falcon, only the word "falcon." To say that we have the falcon, and not the "falcon," is to presume again that we know precisely what it is we have, that we can see it in its entirety, and that we can speak as nature itself.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“This is as much as to say that nature does have a voice, and its voice is no different from our own. We can then presume to speak for the unspeakable.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“What can be explained can also be predicted, if one knows the initial events and the laws covering their succession.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The Master Player in us tolerates this indifference scarcely at all. Indeed, we respond to it as a challenge, an invitation to confrontation and struggle. If nature will offer us no home, offer us nothing at all, we will then clear and arrange a space for ourselves. We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization. We count among the highest achievements of modern society the development of a technology that allows us to master nature's vagaries.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If the goal of finite play is to win titles for their timelessness, and thus eternal life for oneself, the essence of infinite play is the paradoxical engagement with temporality that Meister Eckhart called "eternal birth.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite play remains invisible to the finite observer. Such viewers are looking for closure, for the ways in which players can bring matters to a conclusion and finish whatever remains unfinished. They are looking for the way time has exhausted itself, or will soon do so. Finite players stand before infinite play as they stand before art, looking at it, making a poiema of it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Just as infinite players can play any number of finite games, so too can they join the audience of any game. They do so, however, for the play that is in observing, quite aware that they are audience. They look, but they see that they are looking.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“For the finite player in us freedom is a function of time. We must have the time to be free. For the infinite player in us time is a function of freedom. We are free to have time. A finite player puts play into time. An infinite player puts time into play.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Infinite players cannot say how much they have completed in their work or love or quarreling, but only that much remains incomplete in it. They are not concerned to determine when it is over, but only what comes of it.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time. Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a way of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Each moment is not the beginning of a period of time. It is the beginning of an event that gives the time within it its specific quality. For an infinite player there is no such thing as an hour of time. There can be an hour of love, or a day of grieving, or a season of learning, or a period of labor.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“As an infinite player one is neither young nor old, for one does not live in the time of another. There is therefore no external measure of an infinite player's temporality. Time does not pass for an infinite player. Each moment of time is a beginning.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The infinite player in us does not consume time but generates it. Because infinite play is dramatic and has no scripted conclusion, its time is time lived and not time viewed.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Time divided into periods is theatrical time. The lapse of time between the opening and closing of an era is a scene between curtains. It is not a time lived, but a time viewed-by both players and audience. The periodization of time presupposes a viewer existing outside the boundaries of play, able to see the beginning and the end simultaneously.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten: establishment of the throne of David, the birth of the Savior, the journey to Medina, the battle of Hastings, the American, French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“The passage of time is always relative to that which does not pass, to the timeless.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We look on childhood and youth as those "times of life" rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Early in a game time seems abundant, and there appears a greater freedom to develop future strategies. Late in a game, time is rapidly being consumed. As choices become more limited they become more important. Errors are more disastrous.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“A finite game does not have its own time. It exists in a world's time. An audience allows players only so much time to win their titles.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“Occurring before a world, theatrically, a finite game occurs within time. Because it has its boundaries, its beginning and end, within the absolute temporal limits established by a world, time for a finite player runs out; it is used up. It is a diminishing quantity.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“When sufficiently oblivious to their status as audience, the observers of a finite game become so absorbed in its conduct that they lose the sense of distance between themselves and the players. It is they, quite as much as the players, who win or lose. For this reason the audience absorbs in itself the same politics of resentment that moves players to show they are not what they think others think they are. The audience is under the same constraint to disprove the judgment.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility

“We are players in search of a world as often as we are world in search of players, and sometimes we are both at once. Some worlds pass quickly into existence, and quickly out of it. Some sustain themselves for longer periods, but no world lasts forever.”
― James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility