The laws of chess do not permit a free choice: you have to move whether you like it or not.

On a motif such as was indicated by Reti one cannot build the plan of a whole well contested game; it is too meagre, too thin, too puny for such an end. Reti's explanations, wherever they are concerned with an analysis which covers a few moves, are correct and praiseworthy. But when he abandons the foundations of analysis in order to draw too bold, too general a conclusion, his arguments prove to be mistaken.

The range of circumstances in which it is possible to presuppose the presence of a combination is very limited. The presence of such circumstances is the reason for the genesis of the idea in the master's brain.

A chess game, after all, is a fight in which all possible factors must be made use of, and in which a knowledge of the opponent's good and bad qualities is of the greatest importance.

The delight in gambits is a sign of chess youth... In very much the same way as the young man, on reaching his manhood years, lays aside the Indian stories and stories of adventure, and turns to the psychological novel, we with maturing experience leave off gambit playing and become interested in the less vivacious but withal more forceful manoeuvres of the position player.

I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.