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."

I was a professional chess player in Romania, but only a small-time master. When I came to France, I continued playing chess for many years: I played tournaments in numerous countries with mixed results. I wrote and published a book - La Défense Alekhine and translated two others from Russian. I taught chess in schools; I earned more money through chess than through literature.

I was very lucky that while I was a chess player in a country where chess was not a big deal, I happened to be in the one city where there was a sprouting chess team: Chennai.

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.

It's the horsey-shape piece that moves in an L shape. It's what makes chess complicated, and why stupid people can't play chess. Go play checkers! Knights are the first piece you look at. They elevate the game. No chess master wants to lose her knights.

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?

I love the game - and I hate the Russians because they've almost ruined it. They only risk the title when they have to, every three years. They play for draws with each other but play to win against the Western masters. Draws make for dull chess, wins make for fighting chess.

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

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.

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

The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism.

Chess cannot be taught. Chess can only be learned.

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!).

Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies its peculiar charm. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy.

Between now and when we graduate next year there are at least ten weeks' holiday and five random public holidays. There's email and if you manage to get down to the town, there's text messaging and mobile phone calls. If not, the five minutes you get to speak to me on your communal phone is better than nothing. There are the chess nerds who want to invite you to our school for the chess comp next March and there's this town in the middle, planned by Walter Burley Griffin, where we can meet up and protest against our government's refusal to sign the Kyoto treaty." -Jonah Griggs

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all those more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

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.

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

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

You bring to chess facets of your personality and what you are. I have interests other than chess, like music and world and current affairs. I also have many friends around the world with whom I like to keep in touch.

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.

Chess is ruthless: you've got to be prepared to kill people.

I really chess-play culture shifts. I'm really good at understanding what worldwide cell-phone use means. That's what I do. I try to picture it three to four to five steps ahead.

Chess isn't football or hockey.

You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders.

Once I asked Teichman what he thought of Bird's chess: "Same as his health," he replied, "always alternating between being dangerously ill and dangerously well."

Independence of thought is a most valuable quality in a chess-player, both at the board and when preparing for a game.

Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with IN-SIGHT and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are acculated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life!

Chess is like war on a board

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

But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.

I don't play chess with my life, ya' know.

The only positive contribution to chess from Fischer in the last 20 years.

Chess teaches you to control the initial excitement you feel when you see something that looks good and it trains you to think objectively when you're in trouble

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.

The stomach is an essential part of the Chess master

Chess is not a game, but a disease.

She looks at me out of the side of her uncovered eye. "Chess, Zombie: defending yourself from the move that hasn't happened yet. Does it matter that he doesn't light up through our eyepieces? That he missed us when he could have taken us own? If two possibilities are equally probable but mutually exclusive, which one matters the most? Which one do you bet your life on?

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.

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

Kortchnoi's heritage is many-faceted - over the decades he has several times corrected and changed his style. But the main thing has invariably remained his search for chess truth.

If you truly have expertise - and expertise can be say a chess master who has really mastered something or an artist or a musician of some sort you know if you give a jazz musician.

Fischer prefers to enter Chess history alone

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

A good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced hat he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at ever step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it.

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

We are in truth but pieces on this chess board of life, which in the end we leave, only to drop one by one into the grave of nothingness.