Quotes About Chess

I started playing chess when I was about 4 or 5 years old. It is very good for children to learn to play chess, because it helps them to develop their mental abilities. It also helps to consolidate a person's character, because as it happens both in life and in a chess game we have to make decisions constantly. In chess there is no luck and no excuses: everything is in your hands.

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.

My coach and my parents both had this relationship to what I was doing, which was allowing me to express myself with chess. And so I could love it. I had a passion for it. I was expressing myself through chess, and I was learning about myself through chess.

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

Despite the development of chess theory, there is much that remains secret and unexplored in chess.

Computers have proved to be formidable chess players. In fact, they've beaten our top human chess champions.

The chess world is obligated to organize a match between the champion of the world and the winner of this Carlsbad tournament - indeed, this is a moral obligation. If the world of chess should remain deaf to its obligation, on the other hand, it would amount to an absolutely unforgivable omission, carrying with it a heavy burden of guilt.

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.

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.

I don't know whether computers are improving the style of play, I know they are changing it. Chess has become a different game, one could say that computers have changed the world of chess. That is pretty clear.

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.

His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

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

I don't know if people know this but I am pretty good at chess. I was always on the chess team at school when I was younger.

When you sit down to play a game you should think only about the position, but not about the opponent. Whether chess is regarded as a science, or an art, or a sport, all the same psychology bears no relation to it and only stands in the way of real chess.

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.

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

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

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."

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

In the Soviet Union, for instance, the pressure on the chess stars was immense. When Boris Spassky came home after losing that match, he found he no longer had an apartment in Moscow.

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess.

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.

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.

Marriage is like a chess match is initiated and the board expands over time until it takes up all of a life.

Genius is a starry word; but if there ever was a chess player to whom that attribute applied, it was Paul Morphy.

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

In general there is something puzzling about the fact that the most renowned figures in chess - Morphy, Pillsbury, Capablanca and Fischer - were born in America.

I consider Mr. Morphy the finest chess player who ever existed. He is far superior to any now living, and would doubtless have beaten Labourdonnais himself. In all his games with me, he has not only played, in every instance, the exact move, but the most exact. He never makes a mistake; but, if his adversary commits the slightest error, he is lost.

I played tournament chess from fifth grade up into high school.

I have nothing to do with politics. I came here [Yugoslavia] to play chess and nothing else.

FIDE has decided against my participation in the 1975 World Chess Champion title.

Fencing isn't really fighting. It's more like chess with the risk of puncture wounds

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.

Politics in Iran is not played like American football. It's played like chess. There are multiple moves. You're jumping ahead. And a lot of it is very subtle, and it catches you by surprise later on. So I don't want to go overboard on this.

All chess masters have on occasion played a magnificent game and then lost it by a stupid mistake, perhaps in time pressure and it may perhaps seem unjust that all their beautiful ideas get no other recognition than a zero on the tournament table.

The proponents of Steinitz' theory - Tarrasch and his supporters - tried to express Steinitz' teaching in the form of laconic rules, and as often happens in such cases, they went too far. The laconic tended to become dogmatic, and chess began to lose its freshness, originality and charm.

Analysis, if it is really carried out with a complete concentration of his powers, forms and completes a chess player.

Chess is a curse upon a man.

I felt that chess... is a science in the form of a game... I consider myself a scientist. I wanted to be treated like a scientist.

It was Steinitz who was the first to establish the basic principles of general chess strategy. He was a pioneer and one of the most profound researchers into the thruth of the game, which was hidden from his contemporaries.

All Chess players should have a hobby

Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player

I give 98 percent of my mental energy to Chess Others give only 2 percent

Chess is something more than a game. It is an intellectual diversion which has certain artistic qualities and many scientific elements.

Have you ever seen a demonstrable example of equality in your entire life? Can it be glimpsed in any dog show or classroom? In any ping pong game or chess match? Of course not. It is a philosophical abstraction, something nowhere to be found in nature.

We should talk over the lessons of the day, or lose them in Music, Chess, or the merriments of our family companions.

If in a battle, I seize a bit of debatable land with a handful of soldiers, without having done anything to prevent an enemy bombardment of the position, would it ever occur to me to speak of a conquest of the terrain in question? Obviously not. Then why should I do so in chess?