Quotes About Chess

Botvinnik's right! When he says such things, then he's right. Usually, I prefer not to study chess but to play it. For me chess is more an art than a science. It's been said that Alekhine and I played similar chess, except that he studied more. Yes, perhaps, but I have to say that he played, too.

Once in a Moscow chess club I saw how two first-category players knocked pieces off the board as they were exchanged, so that the pieces fell onto the floor. It was as if they were playing skittles and not chess!

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.

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

I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt.

For me, chess is not a profession, it is a way of life, a passion. People may feel that I have conquered the peak and will not have to struggle. Financially, perhaps that is true; but as far as chess goes, I'm still learning a lot!

We perceive after a careful consideration of the evolution of the chess mind that such evolution has gone on, in general, in a way quite similar to that in which it goes on with the individual chess player, only with the latter more rapidly.

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.

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

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

When I analyse a position, I have a sparring partner who understands chess amazingly well. In a way I feel sorry for him, because of his work with me he cannot play as much chess as he wants. He more or less gave up his playing career.

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

The chess master says nothing, other than moving the silient chess piece.

Bobby Fischer has an enormous knowledge of chess and his familiarity with the chess literature of the USSR is immense.

Botvinnik tried to take the mystery out of Chess, always relating it to situations in ordinary life. He used to call chess a typical inexact problem similar to those which people are always having to solve in everyday life.

Chess you don't learn, chess you understand.

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 may play some exhibition games so I don't want to quit the game of chess completely. I just decided and it's a firm decision not to play competitive chess anymore.

In our town there was a Gestapo officer who loved to play chess. After the occupation began, he found out that my father was the chess master of the region, and so he had him to his house every night.

I don't know how many calories an average chess player burns per game, but it often exceeds that of a player in ball games. It is not only the chess as such: You need to be fit and undergo complicated preparation.

Training in analysis (like any other form of chess training) should be treated very seriously.

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

For the first lesson, I want you to play over every column of Modern Chess Openings, including the footnotes. And for the next lesson, I want you to do it again.

I guess a certain amount of temperament is expected of Chess geniuses

In Chess, at least, the brave inherit the earth

Charles Babbage proposed to make an automaton chess-player which should register mechanically the number of games lost and gained in consequence of every sort of move. Thus, the longer the automaton went on playing game, the more experienced it would become by the accumulation of experimental results. Such a machine precisely represents the acquirement of experience by our nervous organization.

The battle for the ultimate truth will never be won. And that's why chess is so fascinating.

It was not until I got my first job, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and began playing chess with Don Gordon, a brilliant young theorist, that I learned economic theory.

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

He hated games they made the world look too simple. Chess, in particular, had always annoyed him. It was the dumb way the pawns went off and slaughtered their fellow pawns while the king lounged about doing nothing. If only the pawns would've united ... the whole board could've been a republic in about a dozen moves.

The stomach is an essential part of the Chess master

The pawn is the soul of chess.

Fischer prefers to enter Chess history alone

Real chessplayers think about chess more or less 24 hours a day. It is a passion and a fate that one has to live with - and it lasts a lifetime.

Who's straight? I'm not. I am bent gouged pinched and tugged at, and squeezed into this funny shape. Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged... But here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They're rich, usually.

Chess is not for the timid.

Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.

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

A lot of these ideas are built under wrong presumptions which officials have that chess players are lazy bastards whose sole idea is to deceive (the) public and to make short draws and go home. It's not true. It's a lie.

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

For some obscure reason, some authorities seem bent on making the drinking of wine a ritual more complicated than chess. They have succeeded in inhibiting a large section of the public and depriving them of one of the greatest pleasures known to man.

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

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

I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

[Some of the people I'd met] were wonderful people as human beings, and some people were more difficult. I could not see a correlation between their particular genius in playing chess and music and mathematics, etc. ... with human qualities. Some were really good, wonderful people, and some were difficult characters, but there was no clear correlation. But when I met some spiritual masters, [I thought that] there had to be a correlation, and it turned out to be true.

All Chess players should have a hobby

To take charge of destiny means to play a very convoluted chess game on multiple levels of consciousness and existence.

I have always felt that Judit was a relatively slow starter, though she is extremely motivated, diligent, hard-working, and disciplined towards her goals in chess and in life.