Chess Metaphor Quotes

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 Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.

It suddenly occurred to me that every move on the chessboard is old and has been played by somebody at some time. Maybe our own history has been played out by somebody at some time, and we just move our pieces about in the same moves to strike in the same way as people have always done.

If you don't have an end game of something delightful, you're just moving chess pieces around.

Life is not always like chess. Just because you have the king surrounded, don't think he is not capable of hurting you.

At the ches with me she (Fortune) gan to pleye; With her false draughts (pieces) dyvers/She staal on me, and took away my fers. And when I sawgh my fers awaye, Allas! I kouthe no lenger playe.

Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves.

I've never been one of those actors who plays chess with his career and goes, 'I'm going to wait now and see what project comes up that can move me to this or that level.' I take stuff as it comes, and it just so happens that it hasn't dried up yet, touch wood.

The truth of the matter is that chess is not the game of life because life does not ever happen the way you strategize and plan.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

The carnage upon the chessboard of life, left wounded humans in its wake

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.

The mother is the most essential piece on the board, the one you must protect. Only she has the range. Only she can move in multiple directions. Once she's gone, it's a whole different game.

Councilors of state sit plotting their high chess-game whereof the pawns are men.

Wars should be fought with words, not bombs, not weapons. And calm words. I think that wars should be fought over a chessboard and a cup of something to drink.

… to me, I confess, they are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for domination of the world.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

I ask people what piece they are on the chessboard. And some people say 'I'm the king' or 'I'm the knight.' And then they ask me what piece I am, and I say, 'I'm no piece. I take the position of God.'