Chess Quotes

If your opponent is short (on time), play just as you played earlier in the game. If you are short keep calm, I repeat, don't get flustered. Keep up the same neat writing of the moves, the same methodical examination of variations, but at a quicker rate.

Tarrasch's 'dogmas' are not eternal truisms, but merely instructional material presented in an accessible and witty form, those necessary rudiments from which one can begin to grasp the secrets of chess.

Chess and theatre often lead to madness.

The process of making pieces in Chess do something useful (whatever it may be) has received a special name: it is called the attack. The attack is that process by means of which you remove obstructions.

Every move creates a weakness.

Quiet moves often make a stronger impression than a wild combination with heavy sacrifices.

Every great master will find it useful to have his own theory on the openings, which only he himself knows, a theory which is closely linked with plans for the middle game.

Chess is a great game. No matter how good one is, there is always somebody better. No matter how bad one is, there is always somebody worse.

Chess is a matter of delicate judgement, knowing when to punch and how to duck.

Don't even mention losing to me. I can't stand to think of it

No one ever won a game by resigning.

Your body has to be in top condition. Your Chess deteriorates as your body does. You can't separate body from mind

Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game.

The tactician knows what to do when there is something to do; whereas the strategian knows what to do when there is nothing to do

A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician's reputation.

You can only get good at Chess if you love the game

There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones and mine

Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like Pawn structure. Forget it, Checkmate ends the game

The rules of the game are what we call the laws of nature.

On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long

If you want to build a high performance organization, you've got to play chess, not checkers.

Checkers is for tramps

I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.

I play chess, but my past is checkered, The mic and I are like staff and shepherd.

The young people have read my book. Now I have no chance.

A lot of novelists start late-Conrad, Pirandello, even Mark Twain. When you're young, chess is all right, and music and poetry. But novel-writing is something else. It has to be learned, but it can't be taught. This bunkum and stinkum of college creative writing courses! The academics don't know that the only thing you can do for someone who wants to write is to buy him a typewriter.

Few things are as psychologically brutal as chess.

I think that by and large chess players have been very kind. Like I said there have been a few incidents, but they certainly didn't serve to bring me down any.

A brilliant strategy is, certainly, a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audaciousness is not enough.

What could be more advantageous in an intellectual contest - whether it be chess, bridge, or stock selection - than to have opponents who have been taught that thinking is a waste of energy?

In [chess], where the pieces have different and "bizarre" motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound

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.

They're all weak, all women. They're stupid compared to men. They shouldn't play chess, you know. They're like beginners. They lose every single game against a man. There isn't a woman player in the world I can't give knight-odds to and still beat.

There's no one alive I can't beat.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming - or buying software - on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.

When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.

[Professor Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms.

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.

If the media didn't know I played chess, there'd be no angle on me at all.

Chess is the art of analysis.

The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time.

Chess computers do not sweat during time pressure and commit costly blunders. Furthermore, the strength of these programs (over and above their faultless recall processes) lies in their capacity to make relatively superficial tactical decisions with incredible speed. Positional values, long-range strategy, aesthetic judgment, and political astuteness remain staples of human performance, man vs. machine results in the foreseeable future to the contrary not withstanding.

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.

I cannot think that a player genuinely loving the game can get pleasure just from the number of points scored no matter how impressive the total. I will not speak of myself, but for the masters of the older generation, from whose games we learned, the aesthetic side was the most important. -

When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.

If you are weak in the endgame, you must spend more time analysing studies; in your training games you must aim at transposing to endgames, which will help you to acquire the requisite experience.

What is the object of playing a gambit opening?... To acquire a reputation of being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game

Chess is a sport. The main object in the game of chess remains the achievement of victory.

It doesn't require much for misfortune to strike in the King's Gambit - one incautious move, and Black can be on the edge of the abyss.