Quotes About Chess

I ... have two vocations: chess and engineering. If I played chess only, I believe that my success would not have been significantly greater. I can play chess well only when I have fully convalesced from chess and when the 'hunger for chess' once more awakens within me.

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles

After that, Kasparov stepped back from chess which is, and I want this to be clear, not good for chess in general at all. As a whole, the current situation in the chess world leaves a lot to be desired.

The only thing Chess players have in common is Chess.

I just think we should look at this as a chess match," he said, "between the world's greatest chess player and Garry Kasparov.

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

I am not a chess historian - I myself am a piece of chess history, which no one can avoid. I will not write about myself, but I am sure that someone will write.

We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.

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.

It's a shame to be the face of chess and to play chess badly.

Chess has given me a lot more than I could ask for. I have been able to feel special, travel the world and do what I truly enjoy. Moreover, chess players love being their own boss and hate having to wake up early!

Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.

Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'

I do not play chess – I fight at chess. Therefore, I willingly combine the tactical with the strategic, the fantastic with the scientific, the combinative with the positional, and I aim to respond to the demands of each given position.

Of chess it has often been said that life is not long enough for it - but that is the fault of life, not chess.

Chess is my life, but my life is not chess.

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

I tend not to dwell on the parallels between chess and business, chess and the martial arts, or any two things for that matter, because the truth is that all pursuits are connected if we gain an eye for the thematic links.

If you're playing a one-minute game, I could squeeze in five to six games before anybody walked by my cubicle. So I got really good at blitz, one-minute chess games. But that's kind of like the cheap chess version.

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.

Chess is life and every game is like a new life.

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

A game of chess is not an examination of knowledge; it is a battle of nerves.

There is no one 'best set-up', there are many - you can get to mate in endless ways. And - don't forget! - in chess, like in literature, "the other" (the reader, the adversary, the partner, etc.) has to be a collaborator, has to work with you to get to the final goal. We depend on them! But they also depend on us.

While it is a cause for regret that Fischer did not continue to produce scintillating games, he perhaps had a greater impact on chess than any other twentieth century player

...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."

Chess is a more highly symbolic game, but the aggressions are therefore even more frankly represented in the play. It probably began as a war game; that is, the representation of a miniature battle between the forces of two kingdoms

Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move(...)

The pawn is the soul of chess.

Prose is an art form, movies and acting in general are art forms, so is music, painting, graphics, sculpture, and so on. Some might even consider classic games like chess to be an art form. Video games use elements of all of these to create something new. Why wouldn't video games be an art form?

Chess is a contributor to net human unhappiness, since the pleasure of victory is greatly exceeded by the pain of defeat.

Poor Capablanca! Thou wert a brilliant technician, but no philosopher. Thou wert not capable of believing that in chess, another style could be victorious than the absolutely correct one.

Not infrequently ... the theoretical is a synonym of the stereotyped. For the 'theoretical' in chess is nothing more than that which can be found in the textbooks and to which players try to conform because they cannot think up anything better or equal, anything original.

Chess will always be in the doldrums as a spectator sport while a draw is given equal mathematical value as a decisive result.

Drawing is rather like playing chess: your mind races ahead of the moves that you eventually make.

Chess and theatre often lead to madness.

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

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.

No matter how much theory progresses, how radically styles change, chess play is inconceivable without tactics.

You know I'm finished with the old chess because it's all just a lot of book and memorization you know.

I was six when my mother taught me the art of invisible strength. It was a strategy for winning arguments, respect for others, and eventually, thought neither of us knew it at the time, chess games... "Come from the South, blow from the wind - poom! - North will follow. Strongest wind cannot be seen."

Yeah, dolphins and monkeys basically could play chess together. Those are brilliant animals.

Every film, obviously, everyone starts out aiming at making it good, and in the end, filmmaking is really fragile. Making a film is like building a house of cards on the deck of a speeding boat, or playing chess on train tracks. Every opportunity feels like that; it's the one artistic field that's unlike most of the others.

In life, as in Chess, ones own Pawns block ones way. A mans very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him

Expect change. Analyze the landscape. Take the opportunities. Stop being the chess piece; become the player. It's your move.

When I was growing up, I was as socially outcast as any nerd could possibly be. I was in the chess club, I brought D&D stuff to school, I had every game system you could imagine, I spent countless hours at arcades, computer camp, loud presence in the Latin Club. All that stuff.

Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player