In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
Interpretation
Playing chess against oneself is a contradictory act, as it lacks the essential challenge of opposition.
Stefan Zweig highlights the absurdity of playing chess against oneself, comparing it to the impossibility of jumping over one's own shadow. This metaphor illustrates a deeper philosophical insight: the need for external challenges and opponents in life, emphasizing that growth and understanding come through interaction with others rather than isolation.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of competition in personal growth.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.
It is the man who can think of no alternative to his enslavement who is truly a slave.
The boy gathers materials for a temple, and then when he is thirty, concludes to build a woodshed.
Old age is a tyrant, who forbids, under pain of death, the pleasures of youth.
Stay at the center and let all things take their course.
There exists in our society widespread fear of judging…[B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done…Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.