“Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”
Robert Frost (1874–1963) American poet
Address at Milton Academy, Massachusetts (17 May 1935)
1930s
Variant: Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
“The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.”
— Nikos Kazantzakis, book The Saviors of God
The Saviors of God (1923)
Context: I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty.
The mind is patient and adjusts itself, it likes to play; but the heart grows savage and will not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity.
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Nikos Kazantzakis222
Greek writer 1883–1957Related quotes
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Tear it apart.”
Becky Stark (1976) American singer
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Imagine Our Love (2007)
“Ennui is the echo in us of time tearing itself apart.”
Emil M. Cioran book A Short History of Decay
A Short History of Decay (1949)
“I take the world to be but as a stage,
Where net-maskt men do play their personage.”
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer
Dialogue between Heraclitus and Democritus. Compare: "All the world ’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players", William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act ii. Scene 7.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
“We do not quit playing because we grow old, we grow old because we quit playing.”
Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …
This is an anonymous modern quip which is a variant of a statement by G. Stanley Hall, in Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education (1904):
: Men grow old because they stop playing, and not conversely.
Misattributed
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944) French writer and aviator
Source: Terre des Hommes (1939), Ch. IX Barcelona and Madrid (1936)
Context: Human drama does not show itself on the surface of life. It is not played out in the visible world, but in the hearts of men. … One man in misery can disrupt the peace of a city. It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the world.
“The best of my nature reveals itself in play, and play is sacred.”
Karen Blixen (1885–1962) Danish writer
On Modern Marriage and Other Observations (1986)