James P. Carse Quotes

#1. What the winners of finite games achieve is not properly an afterlife but an afterworld, not continuing existence but continuing recognition of their titles.

James P. Carse

#2. For the infinite player, seeing as genius, nature is the absolutely unlike. The infinite player recognizes nothing on the face of nature. Nature displays not only its indifference to human existence but its difference as well.

James P. Carse

#3. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

James P. Carse

#4. The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous.

James P. Carse

#5. A slave can have life only by giving it away. "He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life." (Jesus)

James P. Carse

#6. Belief systems thrive in circumstances of collision. They are energized by their opposites.

James P. Carse

#7. To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does.

James P. Carse

#8. Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong.

James P. Carse

#9. It is, therefore, this fluidity that presents us with an unavoidable challenge: how to contain the serious within the truly playful; that is, how to keep all our finite games in infinite play.

James P. Carse

#10. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

James P. Carse

#11. What will undo any boundary is the awareness that it is our vision, and not what we are viewing, that is limited.

James P. Carse

#12. We see nature as genius when we see as genius.

James P. Carse

#13. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them
unless, of course, I address myself as an other.

James P. Carse

#14. Oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed.

James P. Carse

#15. Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings.

James P. Carse

#16. So also in culture. Infinite players understand that the vigor of a culture has to do with the variety of its sources, the differences within itself. The unique and the surprising are not suppressed in some persons for the strength of others. The genius in you stimulates the genius in me.

James P. Carse

#17. The physicists who look at their objects within their limitations teach physics; those who see the limitations they place around their objects teach "physics." For them physics is a poiesis.

James P. Carse

#18. Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game.

James P. Carse

#19. Strength is paradoxical. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them.

James P. Carse

#20. What I have experienced, and experienced repeatedly, is the silence of God. For many years, this was a distressing matter for me. I did not consider it an experience, but the absence of an experience.

James P. Carse

#21. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out
when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

James P. Carse

#22. In an encounter with divine reality, we do not hear a voice but acquire a voice, and the voice we acquire is our own.

James P. Carse

#23. Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries.

James P. Carse

#24. Moving therefore from an original center, the sexual engagements of infinite players have no standards, no ideals, no marks of success or failure. Neither orgasm nor conception is a goal in their play, although either may be part of the play.

James P. Carse

#25. Just as Alexander wept upon learning he had no more enemies to conquer, finite players come to rue their victories unless they see them quickly challenged by new danger. A war fought to end all wars, in the strategy of finite play, only breeds universal warfare.

James P. Carse

#26. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

James P. Carse

#27. This is a contradiction to all finite play. Because the purpose of a finite game is to bring play to an end with the victory of one of the players, each finite game is played to end itself. The contradiction is precisely that all finite play is play against itself.

James P. Carse

#28. True conversions consist in the choice of a new audience, that is, of a new world. All that was once familiar is now seen in startlingly new ways.

James P. Carse

#29. War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification.

James P. Carse

#30. The homelessness of nature, its utter indifference to human existence, disclose to the infinite player that nature is the genius of the dramatic.

James P. Carse

#31. True parents do not see to it that their children grow in a particular way, according to a preferred pattern or scripted stages, but they see to it that they grow with their children.

James P. Carse

#32. Only that which can change can continue.

James P. Carse

#33. Infinite players die. Since the boundaries of death are always part of the play, the infinite player does not die at the end of the play, but in the course of play.

James P. Carse

#34. I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish as a result of my play with them, but because I can allow them to do what they wish in the course of my play with them. 30

James P. Carse