Quotes About Chess

Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.

Chess is similar to boxing. You need to develop a strategy, and you need to think two or three steps ahead about what your opponent is doing. You have to be smart. But what’s the difference between chess and boxing? In chess, nobody is an expert, but everybody plays. In boxing everybody is an expert, but nobody fights.

Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again.

The middlegame I repeat is chess itself, chess with all its possibilities, its attacks, defences, sacrifices, etc.

Ralph... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.

Leonard Chess passed, and that was the end of the Chess label for that time.

A lot of people think international relations is like a game of chess. But it's not a game of chess, where people sit quietly, thinking out their strategy, taking their time between moves. It's more like a game of billiards, with a bunch of balls clustered together.

Chess cannot be taught. Chess can only be learned.

Chess is not Mathematics, where ten is always more than one; in chess the King with a pawn can beat opponent's King with all pieces if they are placed badly.

I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity the man who has remained ignorant of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make man happy.

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

Chess you don't learn, chess you understand.

A knowledge of tactics is the foundation of positional play. This is a rule which has stood its test in chess history and one which we cannot impress forcibly enough upon the young chess player. A beginner should avoid Queen's Gambit and French Defence and play open games instead! While he may not win as many games at first, he will in the long run be amply compensated by acquiring a thorough knowledge of the game

Having spent 200 hours on the above, the young player, even if he possesses no special talent for chess, is likely to be among those two or three thousand chessplayers [who play on a par with a master]. There are, however, a quarter of a million chessplayers who annually spend no fewer than 200 hours on chess without making any progress. Without going into any further calculations, I can assert with a high degree of certainty that nowadays we achieve only a fraction of what we are capable of achieving.

There are no heroes in chess.

Football is like chess, only without the dice.

Most chess players know, thanks to the study of master games, that two bishops are stronger than two knights or than bishop and knight, though very few know the reason for this advantage and how to turn it to account.

There was one point in high school actually when I was on the chess team, marching band, model United Nations and debate club all at the same time. And I would spend time with the computer club after school. And I had just quit pottery club, which I was in junior high, but I let that go.

I have visited Tromsø and can personally say Tromsø is a beautiful city, well equipped to be an excellent choice for the Chess Olympiad 2014.

I failed to make the chess team because of my height.

Of course, errors are not good for a chess game, but errors are unavoidable and in any case, a game without ant errors, or as they say 'flawless game' is colorless.

You can become a big master in chess only if you see your mistakes and short-comings. Exactly the same as in life itself.

At lunchtime the place is jumping, while at night the dining rooms could have been rented out for chess tournaments.

In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.

Diabetes is passed that way -- over and down, like a knight in chess.

The stomach is an essential part of the Chess master

I have nothing to do with politics. I came here [Yugoslavia] to play chess and nothing else.

It's hard to explain what happens when jazz and punk fuse with a violin twist but it works. Probably because Anson Choi takes off his shirt while he's playing the saxophone. Whoever's not chatting up a Cadet or a girl from Darling House or playing chess with the guys is watching the band. I turn into a groupie.

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they're going to know the truth when I do this book!

You cannot say, 'Go! Go! Rah! Rah! Good move!' People want some emotion. Chess is an art and not a spectator sport.

I study chess eight hours a day, on principle.

All chess masters have on occasion played a magnificent game and then lost it by a stupid mistake, perhaps in time pressure and it may perhaps seem unjust that all their beautiful ideas get no other recognition than a zero on the tournament table.

I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.

Fischer is an American Chess tragedy on par with Morphy and Pillsbury

When I was in grade school I was into chess club, Latin club, D&D, computer camp - everything that made vaginas go away.

We lived in the provincial town of Ramat Gan where I spent most of my youth adjacent to the chess board.

All I want to do, ever, is play chess.

Fischer Chess play was always razor-sharp, rational and brilliant. One of the best ever

Analysis, if it is really carried out with a complete concentration of his powers, forms and completes a chess player.

Computers have changed the world of chess.

I stole a piece of the chess set on the first film. I took a piece of the treasure out of Bellatrix's vault on this film. And I've taken my wand and I've got my cloak.

There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

When I started out playing chess as a kid I thought I should be world champion. As a kid you have no idea what that means and you only sort of picture it. It is hard to imagine that I waited all those years and it happened in a late stage of my career.

The 'chess machine', by which admiring title he had been known, revealed the great drawback of a machine: it had not sufficient flexibility to adapt itself to altered circumstances.

No other great master has been so misunderstood by the vast majority of chess amateurs and even by many masters, as has Emanuel Lasker.

Photography is a system of visual editing. At bottom, it is a matter of surrounding with a frame a portion of one's cone of vision, while standing in the right place at the right time. Like chess, or writing, it is a matter of choosing from among given possibilities, but in the case of photography the number of possibilities is not finite but infinite.