You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Plato
There’s an Eskimo saying, “To win a dogsled race, that’s great. To lose, that’s all right, too.”
And what then is finally the best austerity, what is the best discipline? The best discipline is to enjoy your friends. Enjoy your meals. Realize what play is. Participate in the play, in the play of life. This is known as mahasuka, the Great Delight. Joseph Campbell
Play is the beginning of knowledge. Anonymous
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold. Joseph Chilton Pearce
It is paradoxical that many educators and parents still differentiate between a time for learning and a time for play without seeing the vital connection between them. Leo Buscaglia
Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity. Kay Redfield Jamison
The child amidst his baubles is learning the action of light, motion, gravity, muscular force…. Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most effective kind of education is that a child should play amongst lovely things. Plato
Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning…They have to play with what they know to be true in order to find out more, and then they can use what they learn in new forms of play. Fred Rogers
It is becoming increasingly clear through research on the brain, as well as in other areas of study, that childhood needs play. Play acts as a forward feed mechanism into courageous, creative, rigorous thinking in adulthood. Tina Bruce
The very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play. Karl Groos
Parents who homeschool with the greatest success love to play with their children. They learn to protect children’s playtime. They appreciate how much learning results from many kinds of play. PLAY allows the spark of creative insight to flame—a most powerful learning tool. Ann Lahrson-Fisher
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father. Roger von Oech
Play permits the child to resolve in symbolic form unsolved problems of the past and to cope directly or symbolically with present concerns. It is also his most significant tool for preparing himself for the future and its tasks. Bruno Bettelheim
It is in playing, and only in playing, that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self. D.W. Winnicott
Close observation of children at play suggests that they find out about the world in the same way as scientists find out about new phenonoma and test new ideas…during this exploration, all the senses are used to observe and draw conclusions about objects and events through simple, if crude, scientific investigations. Judith Roden
Children learn as they play. Most importantly, in play children learn how to learn. O. Fred Donaldson
A child loves his play, not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. Benjamin Spock
It’s not so much what children learn through play, but what they won’t learn if we don’t give them the chance to play. Many functional skills like literacy and arithmetic can be learned either through play or through instruction—the issue is the amount of stress on the child. However, many coping skills like compassion, self-regulation, self-confidence, the habit of active engagement, and the motivation to learn and be literate cannot be instructed. They can only be learned through self-directed experience (i.e. play). Susan J. Oliver
Play builds the kind of free-and-easy, try-it-out, do-it-yourself character that our future needs. James L. Hymes Jr.
The main characteristic of play—whether of child or adult—is not its content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity. Jerome Bruner
Play is not only our creative drive; it’s a fundamental mode of learning. David Elkind
As astronauts and space travelers children puzzle over the future; as dinosaurs and princesses they unearth the past. As weather reporters and restaurant workers they make sense of reality; as monsters and gremlins they make sense of the unreal. Gretchen Owocki
The activities that are the easiest, cheapest, and most fun to do – such as singing, playing games, reading, storytelling, and just talking and listening – are also the best for child development. Jerome Singer
Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child’s soul. Friedrich Froebel
Almost all creativity involves purposeful play. Abraham Maslow
Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play. Friedrich Nietzsche
Play is the highest form of research. Albert Einstein
The play’s the thing. Shakespeare in Hamlet
All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. Shakespeare in As You Like It
