Hermann Hesse Quotes

The bad player is the one who tries to calculate and play with the odds, as if his game, his life, were one of a large number of games. To do so is at best to succumb to another necessity, the necessity of large numbers. The good player does not fool himself, and accepts that there is exactly one chance, which produces by chance the necessity and even the purpose that he experiences.

I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.

Some humans are mathematicians-others aren't.

Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.

Chess is the only game greater than its players.

The days when it was possible to win a serious game only by merit of sporting character or depth of chess understanding have vanished forever. Chess knowledge has become dominant, bypassing all the other factors that contribute to success.

You've got to be quick on your feet in this world if you want to survive. Though once you know the rules, it is not too hard to play the game.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.

To venture an opinion is like moving a piece at chess: it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game that is won.

Sometimes you have to lose a piece to win a game.

At that time two opposing concepts of the Game called forth commentary and discussion. The foremost players distinguished two principal types of Game, the formal and the psychological.

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess. I try to stay in games where I have an edge.

Some of my Arcanum bunkmates taught me a card game called dogs-breath. I returned the favor by giving an impromptu lesson in psychology, probability, and manual dexterity. I won almost two whole talents before they stopped inviting me back to their games.

The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game

We do have tendency, now in biology especially to make up stories, to make theoretical biology a kind of game, in fact we have game theory in biology which is meant to use the theory of games to make predictions or explain things.

Business is a game, played for fantastic stakes, and you're in competition with experts. If you want to win, you have to learn to be a master of the game.

A game of secret, cunning stratagems, in which only the fools who are fated to lose reveal their true aims or motives - even to themselves.

Learn to use your brain power. Critical thinking is the key to creative problem solving in business.

Chess is not dominoes

If you know you don't have a win, then there's no use for you being in the game.

Capture of the adverse King is the ultimate but not the first object of the game

Algebra is the intellectual instrument which has been created for rendering clear the quantitative aspects of the world.

There are so many games that I've seen that I've learned from. I never - that's also part of the same - never single out a particular player or a particular game.

I have yet to be in a game where luck was involved. Well-prepared players make plays. I have yet to be in a game where the most prepared team didn't win.