Themes

"When she goes about her kitchen duties, chopping, carving, mixing, whisking, she moves with the grace and precision of a ballet dancer, her fingers plying the food with the dexterity of a croupier."

"Perhaps one never seems so much at one's ease as when one has to play a part."

"Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

"It is interesting that Hindus, when they speak of the creation of the universe do not call it the work of God, they call it the play of God, the Vishnu lila, lila meaning play. And they look upon the whole manifestation of all the universes as a play, as a sport, as a kind of dance — lila perhaps being somewhat related to our word lilt” p\"

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts."

"The play's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."

"Deute den lieblichen Schein und mache Ernst aus dem Spiel, so wirst du das Centrum fassen und die verehrte Kunst in höherm Lichte wieder finden."

"If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am."

"Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear, Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear. So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows. The measure done, I’ll watch her place of stand, And, touching hers, make blessèd my rude hand. Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight! For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night."

"Kirk: The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play."

"Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays."

"Be a clown, be a clown, All the world loves a clown. Act the fool, play the calf, And you'll always have the last laugh."

"Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!"

"I like desires like children and their plays that tease me now and then into knowing life."

"Lila (pronounced Leela) is the play of creation. To awakened consciousness, the entire universe. With all its joys and sorrows, pleasures and pains, appears as a divine game, sport, or drama. It is a play in which the one Consciousness performs all the roles. Alluding to this lila of the Divine Mother the physical universe is a “mansion of mirth.”"

"Lila, as a concept denoting play, is applied to much of Indian thought, both spiritual and secular."

"A play is made by sensing how the forces in life simulate ignorance — you set free the concealed irony, the deadly joke."

"In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time."

"Look around you. Everywhere. They are there. In every home - lurking in dark corners … small, bi-pedal entities with almost human brains play their games in which adults are the pawns. They play and wait for the time when they will take over the world!"

"حَدَّثَنَا مُحَمَّدٌ، أَخْبَرَنَا أَبُو مُعَاوِيَةَ، حَدَّثَنَا هِشَامٌ، عَنْ أَبِيهِ، عَنْ عَائِشَةَ ـ رضى الله عنها ـ قَالَتْ كُنْتُ أَلْعَبُ بِالْبَنَاتِ عِنْدَ النَّبِيِّ صلى الله عليه وسلم وَكَانَ لِي صَوَاحِبُ يَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي، فَكَانَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ صلى الله عليه وسلم إِذَا دَخَلَ يَتَقَمَّعْنَ مِنْهُ، فَيُسَرِّبُهُنَّ إِلَىَّ فَيَلْعَبْنَ مَعِي‏.‏"

"Yesterday, love was such an easy game to play Now I need a place to hide away. Oh, I believe in yesterday."

"By whatever means it is accomplished, the prime business of a play is to arouse the passions of its audience so that by the route of passion may be opened up new relationships between a man and men, and between men and Man. Drama is akin to the other inventions of man in that it ought to help us to know more, and not merely to spend our feelings."

"Machines do not have feelings... This is not to say that no inanimate objects have feelings -- toys are loaded with feelings, for instance, and only a monster would break the heart of a rag doll."

"The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost."

"Wonder Woman: Poor child! You've lived a terrible life- gloomy. Tragic. You're fun starved! You must learn to play!"

"The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power."

"It is a happy talent to know how to play."

"Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought."

"Play it, Sam. Play As Time Goes By."

"Intellectual life has a certain spontaneous character and inner determination. It has also a peculiar poise of its own, which I believe is established by a balance between two basic qualities in the intellectual’s attitude toward ideas—qualities that may be designated as playfulness and piety."

"The purpose of creation, is lila. The concept of lila escapes all the traditional difficulties in assigning purpose to the creator. Lila is a purpose-less purpose, a natural outflow, a spontaneous self-manifestation of the Divine. The concept of lila, again, emphasizes the role of delight in creation. The concept of Prakriti and Maya fail to explain the bliss aspect of Divine. If the world is manifestation of the Force of Satcitananda, the deployment of its existence and consciousness, its purpose can be nothing but delight. This is the meaning of delight. Lila, the play, the child’s joy, the poet’s joy, the actor’s joy, the mechanician’s joy of the soul of things eternally young, perpetually inexhaustible, creating and recreating Himself in Himself for the sheer bliss of that self-creation, of that self-representation, Himself the play, Himself the player, Himself the playground"

"Take a look at those clowns And the tricks that they play In the circus of life Life is bitter and gay"

"ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKES JACK A DULL BOY."

"If you have a rifle, hanging on the wall in the first act, it should fire in the last"

"Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes"

"When the cat's away, the mice will play."

"Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God."

"But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it."

"In modern, independent India, the cotton industry could, once again, compete on the world market. There is a still great diversity in the traditions and methods used to produce Indian cotton. Weavers often work in close family structures where ancient skills are passed from generation to generation and there is a great pride in the work, the fiber and the rich history surrounding even the most simple cotton fabric."

"The rise of Mahatma Gandhi empowered the people of India. Gandhi and his followers were angered by the laws that sent local Indian cotton back to Britain to be milled into cloth, and then sent back to India in which the people were forced to purchase British loomed cotton rather than hand woven khadi. Gandhi saw the revival of local village economies as the key to India's spiritual and economic regeneration and he envisioned homespun khadi as the catalyst for economic independence. He built his strategy around the revival of traditional craftsmanship and skills that would feed local demand with local production. As part of Gandhi’s policies of civil disobedience and non-cooperation, he encouraged people to boycott British goods, specifically cotton textiles, and encouraged Indians to use homespun and woven khadi. In India, he adopted the charka or spinning wheel as the symbol of his principle of self-sufficiency."

"The khadi people made in home workshops and small-scale factories supplemented the small incomes they earned toiling in the fields. Gandhi used khadi as the uniform for the first Non Cooperation movement and the Gandhi cap symbolized the Indo-British battle over the looms of Manchester and a bid for a modern Indian identity."

"Remarkably, very little cotton cloth was imported to England before the 15th century and the small amounts that had been imported were used chiefly for candlewicks. In the 1600s throughout the entire tale of gods and animals, cotton has a role within the story. In India today, as it was for thousands of years, no matter what caste you occupy or what job you hold you will be wearing a cotton garment, either elaborately adorned or a plain."

"By the Guptan period, circa 200 AD, the Indians were selling cotton as a luxury good to their neighbors in the east and west — the Chinese and the Parthians. Further west, the Roman considered cotton as luxurious and as expensive as silk, which they bought from Arabic or Parthian traders. Like Herodotus, the Roman author and philosopher Pliny wrote that in India there were, "trees that bear wool" and "balls of down from which an expensive linen material for clothes is made.""

"The establishment of the Islamic Empire in the late 600’s AD spread cotton production westward across the Middle East to North Africa and Spain."

"I often spin to replenish my energy. And I am not alone. Women and men all over North America sit daily at their wheels, spending time, as Gandhi would have wished, in quiet contemplation."

"I find spinning to be immediately centering and calming. I use wheels to produce quantity, but vastly prefer handspindles, and often carry one with me to spin in odd moments. The spindle shaft is the center pole, the world tree. The whorl endlessly revolves--time, earth, generations--constantly moving, but never going anywhere. Individual fibers appear, become one in the thread, and disappear into the cop. Constantly appearing and going on, yet there is seemingly no change, the point of draft is changeless--a continual coming and going. My hands move as hands have moved for tens of thousands of years, as they do now, as hands will. And so it is."

"Cotton [is] truly a miracle fiber: it has been spun, woven, and dyed since ancient times, and it is still the most widely used fiber for cloth today. It is soft and fluffy and grows in a boll around the seeds of the cotton plant. There is almost nothing that cotton can’t be turned into: clothes, bedding, tabletop, furniture, even art."

"The first people in Eurasia to grow cotton for clothing, sheets, and towels were the Harappan people, an early civilization, who migrated from Africa to what is now modern Pakistan."

"It is made into specialty materials suitable for a great variety of applications: fire-proof apparel, cotton wool, compresses, gauze bandages, sanitary towels and cotton swabs. Industrial products containing cotton include book bindings, industrial thread and tarpaulins."

"The world produces around 25 million tonnes of cotton every year. Six countries - China, Brazil, India, Pakistan, the USA and Uzbekistan - account for more than 80% of total production."