Quotes About Chess

The essence of Chess is thinking about what Chess is.

There is no remorse like a remorse of chess. It is a curse upon man. There is no happiness in chess.

The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.

War is like a game of chess ... but with this little difference, that in chess you may think over each move as long as you please and are not limited for time, and with this difference too, that a knight is always stronger than a pawn, and two pawns are always stronger than one, while in war a battalion is sometimes stronger than a division and sometimes weaker than a company. The relative strength of bodies of troops can never be known to anyone.... Success never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position.

For me, Chess is life and every game is like a new life. Every chess player gets to live many lives in one lifetime.

By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.

My life is split in three parts; I don't know the percentage. One could be called "chess" - the Kasparov Chess Foundation, promoting the game, training young players, playing on the internet, sometimes exhibitions. The second area would be "writing" - books, articles, Twitter, Facebook. And then "political activity" - fighting for human rights and democracy, so TV, interviews, speeches.

I think most people are fascinated by chess for that reason. It's just these mystical shapes. It's almost like Harry Potteresque, like wizard's chess in a way. The pieces come alive and you're the sorcerer. You're the magician and you get to do what you want with them and hopefully you don't screw it up.

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.

My job is to play chess, the game that I love. I achieve what I can in chess. That is what I focus on. Basically, I am always focused on playing the game, and this is important to me.

Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.

Bobby Fischer's current state of mind is indeed a tragedy. One of the worlds greatest Chess players - the pride and sorrow of American Chess

I don't know if I went to the gym, [but] Woody [Harrelson] was 24, and at that point I was like 37, which is when you realize you're no longer 24. So in walked Woody, who was instantly great, but offstage, it was [all] testosterone. We'll arm-wrestle. I still have, like, tendinitis in my elbow. Woody cleaned everybody's clock in everything. Then we got less physical and went to chess, and he whipped our asses with chess.

Chess is a cure for headaches.

Chess isn't football or hockey.

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.

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

Chess is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able - even against a weak opponent, such as my younger brothers or the dog - to get myself checkmated in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

Chess isn't a game of speed, it is a game of speech through actions

In Chess, as it is played by masters, chance is practically eliminated.

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.

Yeah, I used to dress badly until I was about sixteen. But people just didn't seem to have enough respect for me, you know And I didn't like that, so I decided I'd have to show them they weren't any better than me, you know? They were sort of priding themselves. They would say, 'He beat us at chess, but he's still just an uncouth kid.' So I decided to dress up.

I claim that nothing else is so effective in encouraging the growth of chess strength as such independent analysis, both of the games of the great players and your own.

The game of chess is a metaphor for life... it teaches you strategy and it teaches you the value of knowing where you are, where you want to get to and what obstacles are in the way that you need to navigate in order to get there.

The ideal in chess can only be a collective image, but in my opinion it is Capablanca who most closely approaches this.

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?

The most intelligent inspection of any number of fine paintings will not make the observer a painter, nor will listening to a number of operas make the hearer a musician, but good judges of music and painting may so be formed. Chess differs from these. The intelligent perusal of fine games cannot fail to make the reader a better player and a better judge of the play of others.

Golf is the loneliest of games, not excluding postal chess.

[Pawn Sacrifice is] about the 1972 chess championship between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky. I play Paul Marshall.It was a great story of a very peculiar man, another genius who's troubled and lived an interesting life. I had great fun making that.

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.

Chess is a game of bad moves.

Intuition in chess can be defined as the first move that comes to mind when you see a position.

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.

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."

The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move

Chess is not something that drives people mad; it is something that keeps mad people sane.

The physicist is like someone who's watching people playing chess and, after watching a few games, he may have worked out what the moves in the game are. But understanding the rules is just a trivial preliminary on the long route from being a novice to being a grand master. So even if we understand all the laws of physics, then exploring their consequences in the everyday world where complex structures can exist is a far more daunting task, and that's an inexhaustible one I'm sure.

Computers have changed the world of chess.

Which do I prefer? Sex or chess? It depends on the position.

It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

[When asked how someone 6'3" had dared take up golf:] I was too tall to make the chess team in my high school, so I tried golf.

The Russians have fixed world chess.

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.

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.