During a Chess competition a Chessmaster should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk

I have had to work long and hard to eradicate the dangerous delusion that, in a bad position, I could always, or nearly always, conjure up some unexpected combination to extricate me from my difficulties.

Never before and never since have I seen - and I cannot even imagine, such an amazing rapidity of chess thinking that Capablanca possessed in 1913-14. In blitz games he gave all the St. Petersburg players odds of five minutes to one - and he won.

Chess first of all teaches you to be objective.

The purpose of human life and the sense of happiness is to give the maximum what the man is able to give.

The retreat of a minor piece to the back rank, where it cuts the lines of communication between the rooks, is permissable only in exceptional cases.

The infallible criterion by which to distinguish the true from the would-be strategist is the degree of originality of his conceptions. It makes little difference whether this originality is carried to excess, as was the case with Steinitz and Nimzowitsch.