An hour's history of two minds is well told in a game of chess.
Jose Raul CapablancaRead
To improve at chess you should in the first instance study the endgame.
Interpretation
To excel in chess, focus on mastering the endgame first.
The quote emphasizes the importance of studying the endgame in chess to improve overall skills in the game. By understanding how to play and win in the endgame, a player can develop essential strategies, improve their decision-making, and gain an advantage in the earlier stages of the game, ultimately leading to better performances and victories.
In practice
A chess coach might use this quote to encourage students to prioritize lessons on endgames.
An hour's history of two minds is well told in a game of chess.
A passed pawn increase in strength as the number of pieces on the board diminishes.
Chess books should be used as we use glasses: to assist the sight, although some players make use of them as if they thought they conferred sight
The great World Champions Morphy, Steinitz, and Lasker were past masters in the art of Pawn play; they had no superiors in their handling of endgames. The present World Champion has not the strength of the other three as an endgame player, and is therefore inferior to them.
Sultan Khan had become champion of India at Indian chess and he learned the rules of our form of chess at a later date. The fact that even under such conditions he succeeded in becoming champion reveals a genius for chess which is nothing short of extraordinary.
Chess is something more than a game. It is an intellectual diversion which has certain artistic qualities and many scientific elements.
Once, in my father's bookshop, I heard a regular customer say that few things leave a deeper mark on a reader than the first book that finds its way into his heart. Those first images, the echo of words we think we have left behind, accompany us throughout our lives and sculpt a palace in our memory to which, sooner or later—no matter how many books we read, how many worlds we discover, or how much we learn or forget—we will return.
It may be said that an education which does not succeed in making poetry a resource in the business of life as well as in its leisure, has something the matter with it.
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest - and yet it is all these things.
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