The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.
Interpretation
Being skilled in complex games reflects one's capability in other important intellectual challenges.
Edgar Allan Poe suggests that while being a great chess player is admirable, true proficiency in the game of whist indicates a deeper intellectual capacity that can translate to success in various significant and challenging endeavors. This comparison underscores the value of skills that require not only strategy but also an understanding of human interaction and competition.
In practice
This quote can be used in a motivational speech to emphasize the importance of diverse skills.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
At fifteen, beauty and talent do not exist; there can only be promise of the coming woman.
You have too much respect upon the world; They lose it that do buy it with much care
You're afraid of imagination and even more afraid of dreams. Afraid of the resposibility that begins in dreams. But you have to sleep and dreams are a part of sleep. When you're awake you can suppress imagination but you can't supress dreams.
Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.
Thoughts are like drops of water: with our thoughts we can drown in a sea of negativity, or we can float on the ocean of life.
The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.
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