Quotes About Chess

I used to play a lot of chess and competitive chess and study chess and as you get to the grandmasters and learn their styles when you start copying their games like the way they express themselves through... The way Kasparov or Bobby Fischer expresses themselves through a game of chess is it's astonishing. You can show a chess master one of their games and they'll say "Yeah, that is done by that player."

My parents were very supportive of my chess. When I got home after a game of chess, having missed school or something, they always made me feel very welcome; I didn't feel guilty at all about pursuing chess with such fervour. They never, for instance, perceived sports as a rival to academics.

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.

When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.

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.

Chess is a unique battlefield for human minds and computers - human intuition, our creativity, fantasy, our logic, versus the brute force of calculation and a very small portion of accumulated knowledge infused by other human beings. So in chess we can compare these two incompatible things and probably make projections into our future. Is there danger that the human mind will be overshadowed by the power of computers, or we can still survive?

Chess is changing. I hope chess is getting more popular, more spectacular.

While all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

Chess is a good way to learn, to keep your brain fit and the ego in check, a mental form of your local gymnasium. Those who see chess merely as a means of self-proof make the game experience uncomfortable and drive many of the better, more sensitive brains to analysis, correspondence, problems, studies and the like.

I haven't played a chess match for several decades. At one point I lost most of my chess games. Then I realized many of my competitors were memorizing the best moves and I was unwilling to do this.

Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.

In chess the most unbelievable thing for me is that it's a game for everybody: rich, poor, girl, boy, old, young. It's a fantastic game which can unite people and generations! It's a language which you'll find people "speak" in every country. If you reach a certain level you find a very rich world! Art, sport, logic, psychology, a battlefield, imagination, creativity not only in practical games but don't forget either how amazing a feeling it is to compose a study, for example (unfortunately that's not appreciated these days but it's a fantastic part of chess!).

He is the so-called father of the modern school of chess; before him, the King was considered a weak piece and players set out to attack the King directly. Steinitz claimed that the King was well able to take care of itself, and ought not to be attacked until one had some other positional advantage. He understood more about the use of squares than Morphy and contributed a great deal more to chess theory.

Maybe if I didn't have the talent in chess I'd find the talent in something else. The only thing I know is that I have talent in chess, and I'm satisfied with that.

If trading is like chess, then macro is like three-dimensional chess.

I got the chess bug when I was finishing high school, we were doing chess tournaments at my house. I never got to a very high level.

Chess is like body-building. If you train every day, you stay in top shape. It is the same with your brain - chess is a matter of daily training.

Chess is a game that benefits people of all ages, especially kids, in any area of life, business, problem solving, and social skills. Chess has the unique ability to combine focus, concentration, imagination, coordination, teamwork, and leadership all at the same time.

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

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.

The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game

The strategies of offense and defense are very similar between chess and football. Chess really brought closeness to the team back in those days.

I believe that Chess possesses a magic that is also a help in advanced age. A rheumatic knee is forgotten during a game of chess and other events can seem quite unimportant in comparison with a catastrophe on the chessboard.

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it... He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that...in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it.

I got arrested for playing chess in the street. I said, it's because I'm black, isn't it.

Most innovative little board game since Chess.

Throughout my chess career I sought out new challenges, looking for things no one had done before.

Everything is in a state of flux, and this includes the world of Chess

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess.

Chess is a miniature version of life. To be successful, you need to be disciplined, assess resources, consider responsible choices and adjust when circumstances change.

...chess is "a lot like football because you have to set up your offense and your defense, every once in a while you need to give up a piece of your team in order to make the big play. It's a game of patience, and that pretty much defines how I run the ball. I'm patient, always looking for the opportunity and always trying to capitalize on the other person's mistake."

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

I love chess, but it's the height of decadence.

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

Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.

Every time you take a step, even when you don't want to. . . . When it hurts, when it means you rub chins with death, or even if it means dying, that's good. Anything that moves ahead, wins. No chess game was ever won by the player who sat for a lifetime thinking over his next move.

Chess can never reach its height by following in the path of science ... Let us, therefore, make a new effort and with the help of our imagination turn the struggle of technique into a battle of ideas.

Chess is like a language, the top players are very fluent at it. Talent can be developed scientifically but you have to find first what you are good at.

Chess is a game of bad moves.

Chess is neither a science nor an art. It is what human nature most delights in--a fight.

Hold'em is to stud what chess is to checkers.

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

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

Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It's part ballet. It's part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.

Chess is a fathead and feudal game.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people who really enjoy chess are the dubs and the duffers, experts who have resigned their ambitions, those who play only for pastime, and, of course, the great fraternity of the kibbitzers.

As a kid, chess was the first thing I studied in a structured way that helped me gain the discipline to study medicine and become successful doctor.