Quotes About Chess

I love the competitive aspect of it [business]. It's like playing chess. Why do people play chess? Knowing the realm of moves? Even when you get to be a chess master, there are other chess masters you want to beat or outperform. And to me business is just a sport that I love to compete in; a continuous intellectual challenge that really motivates me.

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A sport, a struggle for results and a fight for prizes. I think that the discussion about "chess is science or chess is art" is already inappropriate. The purpose of modern chess is to reach a result.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

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.

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.

Chess960 is healthy and good for your chess. If you get into it and not just move the pieces to achieve known positions it really improves your chess vision.

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

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

Whoever called snooker "chess with balls" was rude, but right.

I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away.

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

Being the undisputed world champion is a relief. We instituted a unified chess title, I am the absolute world champion.

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.

Many men, many styles; what is chess style but the intangible expression of the will to win.

Know that life, which does everything perfectly, is now moving you in a new direction. The chess piece of your existence is being moved to a new square on the board of life.

Chess is a beautiful mistress.

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

I attend to my fitness. I go the gym every day and try to maintain my physical fitness; without that, it is tough to take challenges on the chess board.

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.

Carlsen came with a line that was not very theoretical, trying to challenge the World Champion to play chess. [...] But Anand proved that even this obscure line is something he has studied before, and it was Carlsen that was set back.

Chess is not dominoes

Chess is a game of bad moves.

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.

I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.

As a kid, chess was the first thing I studied in a structured way that helped me gain the discipline to study medicine and become successful doctor.

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.

Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.

Chess is thirty to forty percent psychology. You don't have this when you play a computer. I can't confuse it

Method rules his training, which blends the physical with the mental. How many chess masters put in, prior to an important match, an allotted time daily to bicycling and shadow-boxing, followed by a cold douche and a brisk rub down?

[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.

Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.

The Russians have fixed world chess.

The 'chess machine', by which admiring title he had been known, revealed the great drawback of a machine: it had not sufficient flexibility to adapt itself to altered circumstances.

My studies with Botvinnik brought me immense benefit, particularly the homework assignments which forced me to refer to chess books and to work independently.

The Kremlin is constantly changing the rules of the game to suit its purposes. We are not playing chess, we're playing roulette.

Chess is a very logical game and it is the man who can reason most logically and profoundly in it that ought to win.

Be warned! From Satan's viewpoint you are a pawn in his game of cosmic chess.

The boy (then a 12 year old boy named Anatoly Karpov)doesn't have a clue about Chess, and there's no future at all for him in this profession

I'll always take Scrabble and chess if I'm going filming. But I do have the Scrabble dictionary, which can be infuriating for other players.

By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight.

The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your Opponent to show you what he can do.

It's true that in chess as in politics, fund-raising and glad-handing matter.