Play

“Play is the highest form of research.” -Albert Einstein

“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.”-Plato

"One way to think about play, is as the process of finding new combinations for known things—combinations that may yield new forms of expression, new inventions, new discoveries, and new solutions....It’s exactly what children’s play seems to be about and explains why so many people have come to think that children’s play is so important a part of childhood—and beyond."-Fred Rogers

“Ours is now a world that demands that people know how to learn new things–especially technical things–quickly and well; that they know how to collaborate, especially with people not just like themselves; and that they know how to think strategically and laterally as well as linearly and logically. These are all skills that good video games demand and teach.”-Marc Prensky

“[Students] approach learning as a ‘plug-and-play’ experience; they are unaccustomed and unwilling to learn sequentially–to read the manual–and, instead, are inclined to plunge in and learn through participation and experimentation. Although this type of learning is quite different, it may be more effective for this generation, particularly when provided through a media-rich environment.” — James J. Duderstadt and Farris W. Womack, The Future of the Public University in America: Beyond the Crossroads
“Whoever wants to understand much must play much.” — Gottfried Benn

“Children at play are not playing about. Their games should be seen as their most serious minded activity.” -Michel de Montaigne

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.” — Carl Jung
“Play is training for the unexpected.” — Marc Bekoff

“The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward to new stages of mastery.” — Erik H. Erikson

"If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
-John Cleese

"Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions."
-Mark Twain

"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both."
-James Michener


Photo: "The Sandbox" by Ricardo Carreon

Control

"Leadership is a matter of having people look at you and gain confidence, seeing how you react. If you're in control, they're in control."-Tom Landry

"To do the same thing over and over again is not only boredom: it is to be controlled by rather than to control what you do."- Heraclitus

"Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity and advancement."-Peter F. Drucker

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough."
- Mario Andretti

"When I grip the wheel too tight, I find I lose control."-Steve Rapson

"Give up control even if it means the employees have to make some mistakes."-Frank Flores

"Roll on, deep and dark blue ocean, roll. Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain. Man marks the earth with ruin, but his control stops with the shore."- Lord Byron

"Regardless of how you feel inside, always try to look like a winner. Even if you are behind, a sustained look of control and confidence can give you a mental edge that results in victory."-Arthur Ashe

"The mind never need stop growing. Indeed, one of the few experiences which never pall is the experience of watching one's own mind and how it produces new interests, responds to new stimuli, and develops new thoughts, apparently without effort and almost independently of one's own conscious control."-Gilbert Highet

“Not being able to control events, I control myself; and I adapt myself to them, if they do not adapt themselves to me.”- Michel de Montaigne

“If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins.”-Benjamin Franklin

“Suppose that we are wise enough to learn and know - and yet not wise enough to control our learning and knowledge, so that we use it to destroy ourselves? Even if that is so, knowledge remains better than ignorance.”-Isaac Asimov

“Of all men's miseries the bitterest is this: to know so much and to have control over nothing.”-Herodotus

“Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.”- Adrienne Rich, Storm Warnings

“Give me a staff of honor for mine age,
But not a sceptre to control the world.”- William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus

“The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.”- Philip K. Dick

“I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration; I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming”-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Photo by Sebastian’s Belle

Connections

"Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect...”-Edward M. Forster

"In nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else which is before it, beside it, under it and over it."- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as courses, and they come back to us as effects."- Herman Melville

"One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it. To remain in touch with the past requires a love of memory. To remain in touch with the past requires a constant imaginative effort."-Gaston Bachelard

“I was the girl of the chain letter, the girl full of talk of coffins and keyholes, the one of the telephone bills, the wrinkled photo and the lost connections....”- Anne Sexton, “Love Song”

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”-Albert Einstein

“I am a part of all that I have met.”- Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

“One could not pluck a flower without troubling a star.”
-Francis Thompson

“All things are connected, like the blood which unites one family. All things are connected. Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of the earth. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
-Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle's Letter to All, 1854

“No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”
-John Donne, Meditation XVII

Censorship

"The fact is that censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion." -Henry Steele Commager

"We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavoring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still." -John Stuart Mill

"Fear of corrupting the mind of the younger generation is the loftiest of cowardice."
-Holbrook Jackson

"Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always be the last resort of the boob and the bigot." -Eugene Gladstone O'Neill

"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings." -Heinrich Heine

"Every burned book enlightens the world."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."-Voltaire

Illustration by Isaac Mao

Quotations

"He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors."-Rudyard Kipling

“When a thing has been said and well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it.” -Anatole France

“Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”-Samuel Johnson

“There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.”-Pierre Bayle

“A facility for quotation covers the absence of original thought.”-Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Whimsey (fictional detective)

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit.”-W. Somerset Maugham

"I hate quotation. Tell me what you know."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it."-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“A short saying oft contains much wisdom.”-Sophocles

“The wisdom of the wise and the experience of the ages is preserved into perpetuity by a nation's proverbs, fables, folk sayings and quotations.”-William Feather

"I didn't really say everything I said."-Yogi Berra

Boundaries

"I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries, shutting out and shutting in, separating inside from outside: I have drawn no lines:" -Archie Randolph Ammons, Corsons Inlet

"The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom." -bell hooks

"We love to overlook the boundaries which we do not wish to pass." -Samuel Johnson

"The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings--crowded, active, thick. But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow's horizons are vague and its demands are few." -Larry Mcmurtry

"I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately." -George Carlin

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C. Clarke

"The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for your wits to grow sharper." -Eden Phillpotts

"The space within becomes the reality of the building."-Frank Lloyd Wright



Photo by Makz - Some rights reserved

Horses

"Horses and children, I often think, have a lot of the good sense there is in the world." -Josephine Demott Robinson (1865–1948), U.S. circus performer. The Circus Lady, ch. 16 (1926).

"When I bestride him, I soar, I am a hawk: he trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes." -William Shakespeare, Henry V

"Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hooves i’ the receiving earth;
For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings."
-William Shakespeare, Chorus, in Henry V, prologue

"The essential joy of being with horses is that it brings us in contact with the rare elements of grace, beauty, spirit, and fire." -Sharon Ralls Lemon

"In riding a horse we borrow freedom." -Helen Thomson

"If a horse has four legs, and I'm riding it, I think I can win"
-Angel Cordero