Exuberant Animalisms
This collection of quotes is loosely organized around the themes of health, physical fitness, play and education.
"What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?"
Michelangelo
“Whatever you can do,
Or think you can, begin it.
Boldness has power, and genius,
And magic in it.”
Goethe
"As a people, we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body."
Lewis Thomas
The Medusa and the Snail (1979)
"Play is the exultation of the possible."
Martin Buber
"Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play."
Herodotus, Greek historian
"...civilized human beings are alarmingly ignorant of the fact that they are continuous with their natural surroundings. It is as necessary to have air, water, plants, insects, birds, fish and mammals as it is to have brains, hearts, lungs and stomachs. The former are our external organs in the same way the latter are our internal organs."
Alan Watts
"Every child is born blessed with a vivid imagination. But just as a muscle grows flabby with disuse, so the bright imagination of a child pales in later years if he ceases to exercise it."
Walt Disney
"The human brain and the rest of the body constitute an indissociable organism, integrated by means of mutually interactive biochemical and neural regulatory circuits (including endocrine, immune, and autonomic neural components)...The organism interacts with the environment as an ensemble: the interaction is neither of the body alone nor of the brain alone...The physiological operation that we call mind is derived from the structural and functional ensemble rather than from the brain alone: mental phenomena can be fully understood only in the context of an organism’s interacting in an environment."
Antonio Damasio Descartes’ Error xvi - xvii
"I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"I played with an idea, and grew willful; tossed it into the air; transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy, and winged it with paradox."
Oscar Wilde
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
Helen Keller
"The chief purpose of education is to teach young people to find pleasure in the right things."
Plato (~400 BCE)
"The truly great advances of this generation will be made by those who can make outrageous connections, and only a mind which knows how to play can do that."
Nagle Jackson
"The masters in the art of living make little distinction between their work and their play, their labor and their leisure, their minds and their bodies, their information, their recreation, their love and their religion. They hardly know which is which, they simply pursue their vision of excellence at whatever they do, leaving others to decide whether they are working or playing."
James Michener
"Each day, and the living of it, has to be a conscious creation in which discipline and order are relieved with some play and pure foolishness."
May Sarton
"We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones."
Henry David Thoreau
"In play research, perhaps the single most pervasive and widely held belief about effects is that play makes the player behaviorally flexible: versatile, resourceful, creative, and able to cope productively with the novel and the unexpected. Play is said to develop generic learning skills that enable the player to adapt to new environments and to new situations."
Robert Fagan
Animal Play Behavior
"You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play."
Warren Beatty
"You can take the ape out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the ape."
Frans De Waal
Our Inner Ape
"I have always liked sport and only played or run races for the fun of the thing."
Jim Thorpe
"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."
Arnold Toynbee
"This is the real secret of life is to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play."
Alan Watts
"What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it."
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Wind, Sand and Stars
"The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men."
Alice Walker
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, but who knows great enthusiasms...so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
"Man in the Arena" speech
"The free man should learn no study under bondage...study forced on the mind will not abide there...train your children in their studies not by compulsion but by games, and you will be better able to see the natural abilities of each."
Plato
"Play is motor poetry."
G.S. Hall 1904
"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
Tom Robbins, novelist
"A creature that once knows the pleasure of play will derive satisfaction from it even when youth is gone."
Karl Groos
The Play of Animals
"The trivialization of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement."
Pat Kane
The Play Ethic
"Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished. If you fight the ecology of a system, you lose - especially if you "win."
Gregory Bateson
"So far as knowledge is concerned, a man should be aware of the minuteness of himself and his immediate environment in relation to the world in time and space...Taking an even wider view, he should be conscious of the vastness of geological epochs and astronomical abysses; but he should be aware of all this, not as a weight to crush the individual human spirit, but as a vast panorama which enlarges the mind that contemplates it."
Bertrand Russell
"Progress is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma."
Benjamin Decasseres
"It doesn't take a scientist to realize that a chimpanzee or a dog is an intelligent animal. Instead, it takes a bigoted human to suggest that it's not."
Richard Leakey
"If you want to understand the truth in martial arts you must first throw away the notion of styles or schools, prejudices, likes and dislikes, and so forth. Then, your mind will cease all conflict and come to rest. In this silence, you will see totally and freshly...One can function freely and totally only if he is 'beyond system.' The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is."
Bruce Lee
"The Universe is constituted to maximize play. The best games are not those in which all goes smoothly to conclusion, but those in which the outcome is always in doubt. The geometry of life is designed to keep us on the crux between certainty and uncertainty, order and chaos."
George Leonard
"Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is."
Albert Camus
"You can't depend on your eyes when
your imagination is out of focus."
Mark Twain
"Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings."
Unknown
