When you play competitive tennis you are competing against someone else and you have to win. Playing music I didn't have to win I had to become better within myself.
Everything changes with age. The parts change with age, your feelings about them change, roles that I would've wanted to play 10 years ago, I don't want to play now.
Outside and above the mind there is the play of a consciousness which is lighted by the higher Truth, but man is not conscious of it and of that he has to be conscious.
You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.
Ego is a social institution with no physical reality. The ego is simply your symbol of yourself. Just as the word “water” is a noise that symbolizes a certain liquid without being it, so too the idea of ego symbolizes the role you play, who you are, but it is not the same as your living organism.
We're charlatans in a way, we're magic people. Part of the behind the scenes stuff is to loosen you up, to make you feel that you are experiencing this. This is my style, I did it in Looking for Richard, too. And I figure, if I can weave it into the actual play and get the audience interested, like the robes going up and down, they'll pay attention long enough to consume it.
But nirvana is a radical transformation of how it feels to be alive: it feels as if everything were myself, or as if everything---including "my" thoughts and actions---were happening of itself. There are still efforts, choices, and decisions, but not the sense that "I make them"; they arise of themselves in relation to circumstances. This is therefore to feel life, not as an encounter between subject and object, but as a polarized field where the contest of opposites has become the play of opposites.
I'm not comfortable being around too many people. I don't like being out in public too much. I don't like going to bars. I don't like doing celebrity stuff. So most of the characters I play are people who don't always feel comfortable beyond their small circle of friends.
In the normal play of our mind there are all sorts of perversions; hence the need to stop all these things and inculcate right thinking, right willing - in other words, Truth must be established.
It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.
The secret of poetry is never explained,— is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, and the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, and knows not that they are such. 'T is as easy as breath. 'T is like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, and none knows what it is.
Those who have advanced rise to the mind which is in the head, - they have the play of their mental movements in the head itself. But all these are inside the body; man is, as it were, shut up in a box, his entire consciousness is confined within the organism. This imprisonment has to be undone.
Apparently with no surprise To any happy Flower The Frost beheads it at its play -- In accidental power -- The blonde Assassin passes on -- The Sun proceeds unmoved To measure off another Day For an Approving God.