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A. Bartlett Giamatti

A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

Commissioner of Baseball

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Famous A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

“Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.”

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Book:Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games
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“Baseball is about homecoming. It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.”

FirstsShowsHomeFacesTurnsLanguageGrowsPathJourneySeaColorBaseballThirdsGreenDeeperSpeedFamiliarIslandsFriendlyShoreFoeTheftIndirectHomecomingReefsGuileSkimmingFriendly Faces
Book:A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti
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“A convention is a social pattern we have chosen to prefer over whatever the raw world simply proffers. It is a sign of the operation of the mind, drawing the assent of a sufficient number of other minds so that the agreement will be widely operative. A convention is not a custom; a custom is a habit in which a sufficient number acquiesce. A custom can appear as a convention, but it is really a lesser act, the result of passive acceptance rather than of the imposition of design. It is the difference between learning to live by the annual flooding of the river or by a calendar.”

WorldMindSocialDifferencesResultsNumbersDesignAcceptanceHabitRiversPatternsDrawingChosenOperationsSufficientAgreementLive ByCustomsConventionsPassiveCalendarsAnnualsFloodingImposition
Author:A. Bartlett Giamatti
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“Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process, where one rehearses constantly while acting, sits as a spectator at a play one directs, engages every part in order to keep the choices open and the shape alive for the student, so that the student may enter in, and begin to do what the teacher has done: make choices.”

MayArtDonePlayOrderChoicesProcessActingTeacherAliveTeachingStudentsShapesRealizationCravingSpectatorsPausingSeamless
Book:The University and the Public Interest
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“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

HeartMotivationalFacesFallGamesSportsBreakSummerSpringRainBaseballSeasonsFinalsEveningAutumnAfternoonChampionshipStoppingNew BeginningsFillingChillSoftballAnalogiesAll AloneBreak Your HeartBaseball GamesBegin AgainBlossomingFunny BaseballGreat BaseballInspirational BaseballFunny SportsBaseball HittingBaseball LifeBaseball And LifeBest BaseballGreatest BaseballOpening DayBaseball Opening DayGreen FieldsBaseball Season
Author:A. Bartlett Giamatti
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“All play aspires to the condition of paradise...through play in all its forms...we hope to achieve a state that our larger Greco-Roman, Judeo- Christian culture has always known was lost. Where it exists, we do not know, although we always have envisioned it as a garden...always as removed, as an enclosed green place...Paradise is an ancient dream...It is a dream of ourselves as better than we are, back to what we were.”

KnowsStatesPlayDreamChristianFormCultureLostKnownAchieveConditionsGardenBaseballGreenAncientParadiseAspire
Author:A. Bartlett Giamatti
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“The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.”

IfsKnowsBelieveHumansHas BeensMomentsAbleGamesI BelieveSportsHuman BeingsPleaseWorshipInstantHistorianHumankindGod KnowsAbsentGodlikeAppeaseAnthropologistsTransmutation
Author:A. Bartlett Giamatti
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“Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character.”

MenWellsImportantCharacterBeautifulSuccessJoySpiritWinningStrongSportsPowerfulHealthyStriveSatisfactionWell BeingPurityReplacedDiscreteStrong Spirit
Book:The University and the Public Interest
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