Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that while many forces are unpredictable, fate is strategic and often manipulative, leading to unforeseen outcomes.
In this quote by Terry Pratchett, the metaphor of gods throwing dice represents randomness and chaos in life, while the idea of Fate playing chess symbolizes a more calculated and strategic approach to the unfolding of events. It emphasizes the notion that our lives may be influenced by powers beyond our control, and by the time we realize how these influences have shaped our destinies, it may be too late to alter their course.
In practice
In a discussion about life choices and consequences, this quote could illustrate the unpredictability of fate.
And then Jack chopped down what was the world's last beanstalk, adding murder and ecological terrorism to the theft, enticement, and trespass charges already mentioned, and all the giant's children didn't have a daddy anymore. But he got away with it and lived happily ever after, without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done...which proves that you can be excused for just about anything if you are a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.
They've got something they do it with, I think it's called a mocracy, and it means everyone in the whole country can say who the new Tyrant is. One man ... one vet. ... Everyone has ... the vet. Except for women, of course. And children. And criminals. And slaves. And stupid people. And people of foreign extraction. And people disapproved of for, er, various reasons. And lots of other people. But everyone apart from them. It's a very enlightened civilization.
Geography is just physics slowed down, with a couple of trees stuck in it.
You can't trample infidels when you're a tortoise. I mean, all you could do is give them a meaningful look.
Any fool could be a witch with a runic knife, but it took skill to be one with an apple corer.
People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they're standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don't look quite like real science. But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn't a time. It's a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.
Not that our salvation should be the effect of our work, but our work should be the evidence of our salvation.
But if nothing but soul, or in soul mind, is qualified to count, it is impossible for there to be time unless there is soul, but only that of which time is an attribute, i.e. if change can exist without soul.
Principles are only tools in the hands of God; they will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.
No organic law can ever be framed with a provision specifically applicable to every question which may occur in practical administration. .. No foresight can anticipate nor any document of reasonable length contain express provisions for all possible questions.
It is a great advantage for a system of philosophy to be substantially true.
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.War is god.
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