In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.
Interpretation
Life continues beyond defeats or endings, unlike the finality in chess.
Isaac Asimov highlights the difference between life and chess by emphasizing that, in life, setbacks or apparent 'endings' are not final; we continue to play and find new possibilities, growth, and opportunities even after significant challenges or losses. This perspective encourages resilience and adaptability in the face of adversity.
In practice
During a motivational speech about facing challenges and moving forward after failures.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.
Science does not promise absolute truth, nor does it consider that such a thing necessarily exists. Science does not even promise that everything in the Universe is amenable to the scientific process.
Democracy cannot survive overpopulation.
Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism.
A subtle thought that is in error may yet give rise to fruitful inquiry that can establish truths of great value.
During the century after Newton, it was still possible for a man of unusual attainments to master all fields of scientific knowledge. But by 1800, this had become entirely impracticable.
Imagination is not something apart and hermetic, not a way of leaving reality behind; it is a way of engaging reality.
I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.
We must not measure greatness from the mansion down, but from the manger up. Jesus said that we should not be judged by the bark we wear but by the fruit that we bear. Jesus said that we must measure greatness by how we treat the least of these.
What you are you do not see, what you see is your shadow.
In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.
Geese are white, crows are black. No argument will change this.
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