But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for ...a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's a great huge game of chess that's being played--all over the world--if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is...! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join--though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In chess we find several quite crisp distinctions that can also be discerned rather more problematically in the larger game of lif...e. There are, for instance, the "forced moves" in chess. Moves are occasionally forced by the rules of chess: in these instances one finds oneself so boxed in that one and only one legal move is available.... More interesting ... are the forced moves on those occasions when there is more than one legal move, but only one non-idiotic, non-"suicidal" move, which is said for that reason to be forced. It is forced not by the rules of chess, and not by the laws of physics, but by the dictates of reason. It is obviously the only rational thing to do, given one's interest in winning (or just not losing) the game.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nat...ure. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head--no intricate game o...f chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In poker there is, of course, no attempt to disguise the aggressive element. Poker is a fighting game, a game in which each player... tries to get the better of every other player and does so by fair means or foul so long as he obeys the rules of the game. He may bluff or lie about his own strength, the object of the game being either to frighten the other players into believing that he has greater strength or else to prove it. Chess is a more highly symbolic game, but the aggressions are therefore even more frankly represented in the play. It probably began as a war game; that is, the representation of a miniature battle between the forces of two kingdoms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »