p.1 Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined,
always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing. We can safely assert, even,
that human civilization has added no essential feature to the general idea of play. Animals play just like men.
[JLJ - perhaps even machines...]
p.3 in acknowledging play you acknowledge mind... Play only becomes possible, thinkable
and understandable when an influx of mind breaks down the absolute determinism of the cosmos.
p.4 If we find that play is based on the manipulation of certain images, on a certain "imagination" of reality
(i.e. its conversion into images), then our main concern will be to grasp the value and significance of these images and their
"imagination".
p.6 Children's games, football, and chess are played in profound seriousness; the players have not the slightest
inclination to laugh.
p.19 [Plato quoted] What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived
as play, playing certain games, making sacrifices, singing and dancing, and then man will be able to propitiate the
gods, and defend himself against enemies, and win in the contest.
p.43 Professor Buytendijk therefore calls love-play the most perfect example of all play, exhibiting the
essential features of play in the clearest form... The dynamic elements of play mentioned by Buytendijk, such as the deliberate
creation of obstacles, adornment, surprise, pretense, tension, etc., all belong to the process of flirting and wooing. Nevertheless
none of these functions can be called play in the strict sense. Only in the dance-steps, the preening and strutting of birds
does the real play-element show itself.
p.89 Ever since words existed for fighting and playing, men have been wont to call war a game... Indeed,
all fighting that is bound by rules bears the formal characteristics of play by that very limitation. We
can call it the most intense, the most energetic form of play and at the same time the most palpable and primitive.
p.105 The urge to be first has as many forms of expression as society
offers opportunities for it. The ways in which men compete for superiority are as various as the prizes at stake... But
in whatever shape it comes it is always play, and it is from this point of view that we have to interpret its cultural
function.
p.197 It is probably significant that we no longer speak of "games" but of "sport".
