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James Carse Quotes & Sayings

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James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Power will always be restricted to a relatively small number of selected persons. Anyone can be strong. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Life in death concerns those who are titled and whose titles, since they are timeless, may not be extinguished by death. Immortality, in this case, is not a reward but the condition necessary to the possession of rewards. Victors live forever not because their souls are unaffected by death but because their titles must not be forgotten. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Oppressors themselves acknowledge that even the weakest of their subjects must agree to be oppressed. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Storytellers do not convert their listeners; they do not move them into the territory of a superior truth. Ignoring the issue of truth and falsehood altogether, they offer only vision. Storytelling is therefore not combative; it does not succeed or fail. A story cannot be obeyed. Instead of placing one body of knowledge against another, storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to an horizonal way of seeing. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

The Bible ... provides no guide to reading the Bible. In fact, it is full of such inconsistencies, contradictions, lacunae, obscurities, baffling tales, and poetic imagery that to quote it at all is to select from conflicting alternative passages. Every quotation is therefore necessarily an interpretation. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Only that which can change can continue. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

No one can play a game alone. One cannot be human by oneself. There is no selfhood where there is no community. We do not relate to others as the persons we are; we are who we are in relating to others. Simultaneously the others with whom we are in relation are themselves in relation. We cannot relate to anyone who is not also relating to us. Our social existence has, therefore, an inescapably fluid character ... this ceaseless change does not mean discontinuity; rather change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through it for patterns of repetition. Historians sometimes speak of trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing that each observed history is always of others and never of themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself historical. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful ... everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces ... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past ... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

The death of an infinite player is dramatic. It does not mean that the game comes to an end with death; on the contrary, infinite players offer their death as a way of continuing the play. For that reason they do not play for their own life; they live for their own play. But since that play is always with others, it is evident that infinite players both live and die for the continuing life of others. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

War presents itself as necessary for self-protection, when in fact it is necessary for self-identification. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Therefore, poets do not 'fit' into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their 'places' seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed and its metaphysics ideological. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Myths, told for their own sake, are not stories that have meanings, but stories that give meanings. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players play with boundaries. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

If to look is to look at what is contained within its limitations, to see is to see the limitations themselves. Each new school of painting is new not because ti now contains subject matter ignored in earlier work, but because it sees the limitations previous artists imposed on their subject matter but could not see themselves. The earlier artists worked within the outlines they imagined; the later reworked their imaginations. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

We see nature as genius when we see as genius. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Because infinite players prepare themselves to be surprised by the future, they play in complete openness. It is not an openness as in candor, but an openness as in vulnerability. It is not a matter of exposing one's unchanging identity, the true self that has always been, but a way of exposing one's ceaseless growth, the dynamic self that has yet to be. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

When society is unveiled, when we see that it is whatever we want it to be, that it is a species of culture with nothing necessary in it, by no means a phenomenon of nature or a manifestation of instinct, nature is no longer shaped and fitted into one or another set of societal goals. Unveiled, we stand before a nature whose only face is its hidden self-origination: its genius. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself. What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

The finite play for life is serious; the infinite play of life is joyous. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Strictly speaking, waste persons do not exist outside the boundaries of a society. They are not society's enemies. One does not go to war against them, as one goes to war against another society. Waste persons do not constitute an alternative or threatening society; they constitute an unveiling culture. They are therefore "purged". A society cleanses itself of them. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Infinite speech is that mode of discourse that consistently reminds us of the unspeakability of nature. It bears no claim to truth, originating from nothing but the genius of the speaker. Infinite speech is therefore no about anything; it is always to someone. It is not command, but address. It belongs entirely to the speakable. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By Daniel H. Pink

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility BY JAMES P. CARSE — Daniel H. Pink

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. 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. The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

We understand nature as source when we understand ourselves as source. We abandon all attempts at an explanation of nature when we see that we cannot be explained, when our own self-origination cannot be stated as fact. We behold the irreducible otherness of nature when we behold ourselves as its other. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

Belief systems thrive in circumstances of collision. They are energized by their opposites. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

There is no narrative without structure, or plot. In a great story this structure seems like fate, like an inescapable judgment descending on its still unaware heroes, a great metaphysical causality, that crowds out all room for choice. Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent. The exercise of your freedom cannot prevent the exercise of my own freedom, but it can determine the context in which I am to act freely. You cannot make choices for me, but you can largely determine what my choices will be about. Great stories explore the drama of this deeper touching of one free person by another. They are therefore genuinely sexual dramas astounding us once more with the magic of origins. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

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

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

If the losers are dead, the dead are also losers.
There is a contradiction here: If the prize for winning finite play is life, then the players are not properly alive. They are competing for life. Life, then, is not play, but the outcome of play. Finite players play to live; they do not live their playing. Life is therefore deserved, bestowed, possessed, won. It is not lived. — James P. Carse

James Carse Quotes By James P. Carse

To use Freud's famous phrase, the civilized are, therefore, the discontent. We do not become losers in civilization but become civilized losers. The collective result of this ineradicable sense of failure is that civilizations take on the spirit of resentment. Acutely sensitive to an imagined audience, they are easily offended by other civilizations. Indeed, even the most powerful societies can be embarrassed by the weakest: the Soviet Union by Afghanistan, Great Britain by Argentina, the United States by Grenada. — James P. Carse