Quotes About Children Play

#1. It was a grand old house, the Ayemenem House, but aloof-looking. As though it had little to do with the people who lived in it. Like an old man with rheumy eyes watching children play, seeing only transience in their shrill elation and their whole-hearted commitment to life.

Arundhati Roy

#2. I wouldn't let my children play football.

Peter Landesman

#3. Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood.

Fred Rogers

#4. Children play soldier. That makes sense. But why do soldiers play children?

Karl Kraus

#5. Now I lay me down to sleep upon my pillow fluffed up so deep my dreams will take me far away to the land all children play when I wake with that new yawn shortly after the new dawn I'll try to have the best day I can until I return to my dream land

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#6. And there's that one particular harbor
Sheltered from the wind
Where the children play on the shore each day
And all are safe within ...

Jimmy Buffett

#7. From watching children play with objects designed as "amusements," we come to a new place, a place of cold comforts. Child and adult, we imagine made to measure companions. Or, at least we imagine companions who are always interested in us.

Sherry Turkle

#8. If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.

Daniel Greenberg

#9. Women play on their beauty as children play with their knives. And they hurt themselves on it, too.

Victor Hugo

#10. For children, play is exceedingly seriously & important

Fred Rogers

#11. You never realize the value of coaching until your children play for a coach

Don Meyer

#12. As the fathers live, so the children play.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

#13. Children smile 400 times a day on average ... adults 15 times.
Children laugh 150 times a day ... adults 6 times per day.
Children play between 4-6 hours a day ... adults only 20 minutes a day.
What's happened?

Robert Holden

#14. I think it's God that makes people care for people, Jefferson. I think it's God makes children play and people sing. I believe it's God that brings loved ones together. I believe it's God that makes trees bud and food grow out of the earth.

Ernest J. Gaines

#15. Two kangaroos were talking to each other, and one said, 'I hope it doesn't rain today. I hate it when the children play inside.

Henny Youngman

#16. Look for the hand that points the way,
And take the path where children play.
Then where the face with breath that sighs
Bends to admire its gleaming eyes,
You way is marked by lines of light
That mean escape from endless night.

Emily Rodda

#17. When I became a father acting sort of took the place of what I did in my free time and my children became the main focus. I play a lot and my children play. Both my sons - my daughter's still too young really - have surpassed me with their music skills, which is wildly irritating.

Paul Bettany

#18. There is nothing better than work. Work is also play; children know that. Children play earnestly as if it were work. But people grow up, and they work with a sorrow upon them. It's duty.

Mary Oliver

#19. Children play from the library of their imagination and it feels real to them.

S. E. Entsua-Mensah

#20. In the area we live, there's a large show of children who run from one house to another house to another house. That's lovely because it means all the children play together, and all the adults get to sit around and have coffees and read the papers or go to the park.

Helen McCrory

#21. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. In an information society, children play with information

Henry Jenkins

#22. You know, it's just politics, it's a game grown-ups like to play, like we lil' children play with toys.

Sharon Maas

#23. You're a Dark-Hunter."
He kissed her lightly on the lips. "What I am is a man in love with a woman. I want you, Amanda. For the rest of my blessedly short mortal life. I want to wake at dawn with you in my arms and watch our children play and fight.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#24. The next time you see a bum leaving drug needles in a park where children play or urinating in the street, you are seeing your tax dollars at work and the end result of the vision of the anointed.

Thomas Sowell

#25. Gradually, football has seen its appeal slip at the most basic levels. Pediatricians are advising parents not to let young children play organized football too early in life.

Charlie Pierce

#26. Men should learn to live with the same seriousness with which children play.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#27. Birds fly, fish swim, and children play.

Garry L. Landreth

#28. You know the way that children play make-believe in the garden? I did that and I thought, 'This will do for life. Why would I want to do anything else?'

Harry Treadaway

#29. Let the children play, let the children be children! And let us wish the same thing for the adults, let them also be children, especially when they turn into a boring creature!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#30. One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good.

Giorgio Agamben

#31. The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.

Richard J. Borden

#32. In the true man there is a child concealed who wants to play.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#33. I could not be more determined and robust about this. I want more children to play cricket and to have the chance to compete. I want them playing on the correct pitches with hard balls and proper headgear.

Tessa Jowell

#34. I did play Ramses II once, who lived to be 91 and had 120 children, but he died 4,000 years ago.

Christopher Lee

#35. A name, for me, is a short way of working out what class that child comes from. Do I want my child to play with them?

Katie Hopkins

#36. Much later I realized that Russian people, because of the poverty and squalor of their lives, love to amuse themselves with sorrow--to play with it like children, and are seldom ashamed of being unhappy.

Maxim Gorky

#37. I wish I could anticipate some of the stories and lies that will be told. It's going to be great to get everyone together so we can tell all of the families, all of the wives and children, just how good we were because they never got to see us play.

Larry Conley

#38. Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family.

Barbara Coloroso

#39. How nice of Acheron to send us a playmate. (Daimon)
Play is for children and dogs. Now that you have identified which category you fall into, I'll show you what Romans do to rabid dogs. (Valerius)

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#40. Nothing appeals to children more than justice, and they should be taught in the nursery to "play fair" in games, to respect each other's property and rights, to give credit to others, and not to take too much credit to themselves.

Emily Post

#41. Each of us, as citizens, has a role to play in creating a better world for our children

Nelson Mandela

#42. Perhaps we invented the gods so that we could put the blame on them. They gave us permission to eat flesh. They gave us permission to play with unclean things. It's not our fault, it's theirs. We're just their children.

J.M. Coetzee

#43. At the center of everything we call 'the arts,' and children call 'play,' is something which seems somehow alive.

Lynda Barry

#44. Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.

Hugh Mackay

#45. The concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline. In real play, which is real concentration, the child is not only outside time, he is outside himself.

Madeleine L'Engle

#46. I believe that the school must represent present life - life as real and vital to the child as that which he carries on in the home, in the neighborhood, or on the play-ground.

John Dewey

#47. On these magic shores children at play are for ever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.

J.M. Barrie

#48. From a child's play, we can gain understanding of how he sees and construes the world
what he would like it to be, what his concerns are, what problems are besetting him.

Bruno Bettelheim

#49. The physical world - the world of stone and brick - is indifferent to our suffering, to our dramas, she thought. Even a battlefield can be peaceful, can be a place for flowers to grow, for children to play; the memories, the sadness, are within us, not part of the world about us.

Alexander McCall Smith

#50. Play is the work of children. It's very serious stuff.

Bob Keeshan

#51. In everything was the spirit of children's play - not the rule-ridden, time-killing play of adults that is a preparation for death, but the busy and credulous play of children that is a preparation for life.

Sinclair Lewis

#52. I struggle to listen, to sit, and to study-
I would rather play and create art with my brushes and putty.

I wish I could focus on things that I know-
Like cars, Mars, and playing with dough.

Brenda Lochinger

#53. It is a violent sport that we choose as men, and that we as parents allow our children to play.

Troy Vincent

#54. When I was a child I liked the games of Capablanca, and later I was captivated by Alekhine's play.

Vladimir Kramnik

#55. Children raised with respect and inner direction tend to play well in groups, at times quite peacefully, each involved in her own project or involved with the other chidren.

Magda Gerber

#56. I am willing to remain and play the man's game if there are not enough boats for more than the women and children. Tell my wife I played the game straight out and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim is a coward.

Benjamin Guggenheim

#57. Libraries have a special role to play in our knowledge economy. Your institutions have been and should be a place where parents and children come to read together and learn together. We should take our kids there more.

Barack Obama

#58. If you are going to take away war toys, then what are you to replace them with? Children need to feel courageous, brave, and assertive. They need to feel strong; that is the purpose of their play.

Brian Sutton-Smith

#59. Imagine, pretend, and play so you can become anyone you want to be. You don't need to be afraid.

Carolyn Byers Ruch

#60. A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children's best friend. ... Child care is play to a woman who is happy. And only a man can make a woman happy. In deepest truth, a father's first duty to his children is to make their mother feel fulfilled as a woman.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#61. A society that's provided for by television is a society that says it doesn't need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them.

Michael Leunig

#62. Not by force shall the children learn, but through play

Plato

#63. There's this assumption that all children have the luxury of a childhood where their innocence is always respected and their main occupation is pleasant play - at the age of 18 or 21, they are then thrust into the real world and shown its uglier side, but not before.

Margo Lanagan

#64. Without children, there is no careless play; the laughter has died. Only the gruesome reality of the day is left, an unchanging reality knowing no miracles, no breaks, no dreams.

Henry Martin

#65. It is exactly the fear of revenge that motivates the deepest crimes, from the killing of the enemy's children lest they grow up to play their own part, to the erasure of the enemy's graveyards and holy places so that his hated name can be forgotten.

Christopher Hitchens

#66. Robots already perform many functions, from making cars to defusing bombs - or, more menacingly, firing missiles. Children and adults play with toy robots, while vacuum-cleaning robots are sucking up dirt in a growing number of homes and - as evidenced by YouTube videos - entertaining cats.

Peter Singer

#67. [Children] just cannot be sad too long, it is not in them, as children mourn in little bits here and there like patchwork in their lives.

Nancy E. Turner

#68. I wouldn't want to play Miss Hannigan. I'm not a villain. She's mean to little children! I can't do that. That would disrupt my brand.

Kathleen Hanna

#69. Our country's growing obsession with organized sports isn't just hurting our children, but also our communities. As play is siphoned off to gyms and fields, fewer kids are playing in our streets, parks, and playgrounds.

Darell Hammond

#70. Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure.

Henry David Thoreau

#71. I hope my organization will not be around in 10 years, because at a national, state, and community level, we will have evolved into a society that cares about children and the need for play.

Darell Hammond

#72. I like working in children's books because it gives rise to such a variety of jobs. One month it may be a picture book, the next a retelling, the next a play, a short story or the start of the next novel.

Geraldine McCaughrean

#73. When I am not paying attention to my children, they appear to desperately need it. When I am giving them my full attention, they seem just as happy to play by themselves. It is as though they need to be certain of my attention in order to play their own games and ignore me.

Sarah Ruhl

#74. Stress reduction, greater physical health, a deeper sense of spirit, more creativity, a sense of play, even a safer life-these are the rewards that await a family then it invites more nature into children's lives.

Richard Louv

#75. Put a small child in a playpen with an apple and a bunny. If s/he eats the apple and plays with the bunny, s/he's normal;but if s/he eats the bunny and plays with the apple, I'll buy you a new car. Somewhere along the line we must have been TAUGHT to do the wrong thing.

Maynard James Keenan

#76. You've probably met moms like that. You say, "Yeah, I scored a goal in the soccer game last night." And she says, "Oh, that's nice. All fourteen of my children are the captains of their teams, and they make straight A's and can play the violin." And you just want to smack her.

Rick Riordan

#77. How you handle peer pressure - the pressure your children feel as well as the pressure you feel - in the early years will play a significant role in how your children handle peer pressure when they become adolescents.

Kevin Leman

#78. I also really liked playing Mr. Tumnus in 'Narnia'. I got to play my favorite character in children's literature, which I loved. You don't get the chance to do that in other jobs.

James McAvoy

#79. We live in a world of entertainment in full color with a lot of fast action, a world in which many children grow up thinking that if it isn't fun, it is boring and not worthwhile. Even in family activities we need to strike a balance between play and work.

Joe J. Christensen

#80. Having heard Clifford Brown play all those fast runs, I used to really practice Clarke trumpet exercises all day long so that I could play fast. That's all I wanted to do. I was like a child with a toy.

Wynton Marsalis

#81. Puzzles are made of the things that the mathematician, no less than the child, plays with, and dreams and wonders about, for they are made of things and circumstances of the world he [or she] live in.

Edward Kasner

#82. I want to play the fake child on 'To Catch A Predator.' No, wait! I want to play the Leaf Man!

Carey Mulligan

#83. Children and scientists share an outlook on life. 'If I do this, what will happen?' is both the motto of the child at play and the defining refrain of the physical scientist.

James Gleick

#84. When I confess a couple who have kids, a married couple, I ask, 'how many children do you have?' Some get worried and think the priest will ask why I don't have more. I would make a second question, 'Do you play with your children?' The majority say, 'but father, I have no time. I work all day.'

Pope Francis

#85. The main characteristic of play - whether of child or adult - is not it content but its mode. Play is an approach to action, not a form of activity.

Jerome Bruner

#86. Play Therapy is based upon the fact that play is the child's natural medium of self-expression. It is an opportunity which is given to the child to 'play out' his feelings and problems just as, in certain types of adult therapy, an individual 'talks out' his difficulties.

Virginia Axline

#87. People who say that only young people voted on the Internet, those who didn't see Pele play, forget that children are not orphans. There's always a father who buys the computer and perhaps influences their vote. I won the people's vote.

Diego Maradona

#88. Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play; they will find that what they have mastered is child's play.

Carl Orff

#89. In the creative process there is the father, the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part; and the child, the role to be born.

Constantin Stanislavski

#90. I don't play Hollywood maids, the hee-hee kind of people who are so in love with their madam's children they have no time for their own.

Esther Rolle

#91. A man of sense only trifles with them, plays with them, humors and flatters them, as he does with a sprightly and forward child; but he neither consults them about, nor trusts them with, serious matters.

Lord Chesterfield

#92. I always knew Fitz would wind up writing; although I figured he'd be a poet or a storyteller. He would play with language the way other children played with stones and twigs, building structures for the rest of us to decorate with our imagination.

Jodi Picoult

#93. The winter wind is loud and wild, Come close to me, my darling child; Forsake thy books, and mate less play; And, while the night is gathering grey, We'll talk its pensive hours away.

Emily Bronte

#94. I have a bumper sticker that Bowen created that says Regardless of my kids grades, they have an 'A' in my book'. Without play the child that still lives in all of us will always be incomplete. And not only physically, but creatively, intellectually, and spiritually as well.

George A. Sheehan

#95. Why we play as children is not because it is our work or because it is how we learn, though both statements are true; we play because we are wired for joy, it is imperative as human beings.

John Thorn

#96. There's no one with intelligence in this town except that man over there playing with the children, the one riding the stick horse. He has keen, fiery insight and vast dignity like the night sky, but he conceals it in the madness of child's play.

Rumi

#97. [ ... ]make sure you raise your children by having them play in their studies, and don't use force.

Plato

#98. It's very important, no matter what you may do professionally, to keep alive some of the healthy interests of your youth. Children's play is not just kids' stuff. Children's play is rather the stuff of most future inventions.

Fred Rogers

#99. There are dozens of ways of failing to make money. It is one thing to fail to make money because your single talent happens to be a flair amounting to genius for translating the plays of Aristophanes. It is quite another thing to fail to make money because you are black, or a child, or a woman.

Margaret Halsey

#100. The notion of children being "kindergarten ready" is a bizarre oxymoron. It's like saying you have to know how to play the piano before you can learn how to play the piano.

Peter Campbell