Luck has nothing to do with rationality or morality; by its nature it has about it a quality akin to magic; belonging to a primitive, more youthful stage of mankind’s history. The lucky innocent, showered with gifts by the fairies, pampered by the Gods, is not the object of rational study, and hence not a fit subject for biographical analysis; he is a symbol who always stands outside the personal and historical realms. Nevertheless, there are outstanding men with whose lives “luck” is intimately bound up, even though that luck may consist merely in the fact that they and the task proper to their talents actually intersect on the plane of history and biography, that they are born neither too soon nor too late.
—Herman Hesse
—from The Glass Bead Game
