p.8 [Reginald Snell, translator] It was a casual remark of Kant's that art, compared with labour, may be considered as play, that originally prompted him [Schiller] to develop his own theory of the play impulse set forth in these Letters, but he rejected much of this master's asceticism and moral rigour

p.16 [Reginald Snell] Why, then, after such criticism and such admissions as the above, do I nevertheless commend these Letters to the attention of every educated person? The answer is simple: as a piece of philosophical thinking they may be gravely faulty, as an essay in sustained argument they may be occasionally perplexing, but as an educational manifesto they are pure gold. The faults to which I have drawn attention above do not finally matter; they should not affect our estimate of the value of their central thesis

p.17 [Herbert Read] Schiller alone being an exception... Scholars... have treated Plato's most passionate ideal as an idle paradox... The thesis is that art should be the basis of education.

p.74 The sense impulse requires variation, requires time to have a content; the form impulse requires the extinction of time, and no variation. Therefore the impulse in which both are combined (allow me to call it provisionally the play impulse, until I have justified the term), this play impulse would aim at the extinction of time in time and the reconciliation of becoming with absolute being, of variation with identity.
  The sense impulse wants to be determined, to receive its object; the form impulse wants to determine for itself, to produce its object; so the play impulse will endeavour to receive as it would itself have produced, and to produce as the sense aspires to receive.

p.76 The object of the sense impulse... may be called life... The object of the form impulse... may be called shape... The object of the play impulse, conceived in a general notion, can therefore be called living shape... what we call Beauty in the widest sense of the term.

p.79 But why call it a mere game, when we consider that in every condition of humanity it is precisely play, and play alone, that makes man complete and displays at once his twofold nature? [JLJ - from p.77, 'We know that Man is neither exclusively matter nor exclusively spirit' - Schiller is contrasting life and form.]

p.125 Extreme stupidity and extreme intelligence have a certain affinity with each other, that both seek only the 'real' and are wholly insensible to mere appearance.

p.126-127 In the same fashion as the play impulse becomes active in him, and finds pleasure in appearance, there follows also the imitative creative impulse which treats appearance as something absolute.

p.134 Man's imagination... an unconstrained sequence of images constitutes its whole attraction...The majority of games which are in vogue in ordinary life either depend entirely on this feeling of the free sequence of ideas, or at any rate derive their chief attraction from it... Only as it turns away from actuality does plastic power rise to the ideal, and before the imagination can act according to its own law in its productive quality, it must already have liberated itself from extraneous law in its reproductive process... this power can now develop with greater facility, since the senses are not working counter to it

p.139 Beauty alone makes all the world happy, and every being forgets its limitations as long as it experiences her enchantment.