You can deny, if you like, nearly all abstractions: justice, beauty, truth, goodness, mind, God. You can deny seriousness, but not play.

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.

Culture arises and unfolds in and as play... culture itself bears the character of play.

Play is a uniquely adaptive act, not subordinate to some other adaptive act, but with a special function of its own in human experience.

Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.

Educators are aware that they can reach the youth only by making use of gang spirit and guiding it, not by working against it.

The eternal gulf between being and idea can only be bridged by the rainbow of imagination.

If we are to preserve culture we must continue to create it.

The modern city hardly knows a pure darkness or true silence anymore, nor does it know the effect of a single small light or that of a lonely distant shout.

Quite apart from any conscious program, the great cultural historians have always been historical morphologists: seekers after theforms of life, thought, custom, knowledge, art.

Life is made too easy. Mankind's moral fibre is giving way under the softening influence of luxury.

I do not know how to thank you.''I can tell you, ' said Obierika. 'Kill one of your sons for me.''That will not be enough, ' said Okonkwo.'Then kill yourself, ' said Obierika.

The restlessness and the longing, like the longing that is in the whistle of a faraway train. Except that the longing isn't really in the whistle—it is in you.

There could be no honor in a sure success but much might be wrested from a sure defeat.

Development of outlook naturally begins with a respect for God... Reverence to God and reverence for one's neighbor and reverence for oneself as a servant of God.

When you turn that fantasy into a fact, you are in a position to build even better fantasies. And that, my friend, is the Creative Process.

The dog doesn't know the difference between Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, so I have to walk the dog early those days too.

If you're wearing a Bluetooth thing and you've got that thing on your belt, you are working for somebody else. You are not the guy in charge. That's a really good social status indicator.

I'm not a philosopher. I am the next thing to a jock, which is a novelist.

Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself.

It is good for a professional to be reminded that his professionalism is only a husk, that the real person must remain an amateur, a lover of the work.