Somewhere along the line we learn that work is not fun and that play is
not work. Not so. Play is an essential part of life and an even more
essential part of creativity. Tinkering just for the hell of it is how
many inventions came into being. So go on. You have my permission. Play.
See also
children*, dreaming, education, enjoyment, imagination*, learning,
letting go, openness*, wonder
Quotes
‘play so that you may be serious.’
— Anarchasis
‘Very often the effort men put into activities that seem completely useless
turns out to be extremely important in ways no one could foresee. Play has
always been the mainspring of culture.’
— Italo Calvino
‘When truly creative people come up with a new idea, they don not reject it
immediately because of its flaws. They play with it, looking for strengths and
sliding over weaknesses.’
— David Campbell
‘If you want creative workers, give them enough
time to play.’
— John Cleese
‘If life doesn’t offer a game worth playing, then invent a new one.’
— Anthony J. D’Angelo
‘Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.’
— Miles Davis
‘Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.’
— Miles Davis
‘This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive
thought.’
— Albert Einstein
‘To stimulate creativity, one must develop the childlike inclination for play
and the childlike desire for recognition.’
— Albert Einstein
‘I play with microbes. There are, of course, many rules to this play…but when
you have acquired knowledge and experience it is very pleasant to break the
rules and to be able to find something nobody has thought of.’
— Alexander Fleming
‘All work and no play doesn’t just make Jill and Jack dull, it kills the
potential of discovery, mastery and openness to change and flexibility and it
hinders innovation and invention.’
— Joline Godfrey
‘We are more ready to try the untried when what we do is inconsequential.
Hence the remarkable fact that many inventions had their birth as toys.’
— Eric Hoffer
‘The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by
the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with
objects it loves.’
— Carl Gustav Jung
‘Without this playing with fantasy, no creative work has ever yet come to
birth. The debt we owe to the play of the imagination is incalculable.’
— Carl Gustav Jung
‘The human race is divided into two sharply differentiated and mutually
antagonistic classes: a small l minority that plays with ideas and is capable of
taking them in, and a vast majority that finds them painful, and is thus arrayed
against them, and against all who have traffic with them.’
— H. L. Mencken
‘Don’t play the saxophone. Let it play you.’
— Charlie Parker
‘Man’s most serious activity is play.’
— George Santayana
‘To retain the simple playfulness of childhood through one’s riper years is
what opens a person up to the creative possibilities within a situation.’
— Denise Shekerjian
‘I played with an idea, and grew wilful; tossed it into the air; transformed
it; let it escaped and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged
it with paradox.’
— Oscar Wilde
|