Quotes on Chess

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.

Setbacks and losses are both inevitable and essential if you're going to improve and become a good, even great, competitor. The art is in avoiding catastrophic losses in the key battles.

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.

Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you don't find out til too late that he's been playing with two queens all along.

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.

One does not succeed by sticking to convention. When your opponent can easily anticipate every move you make, your strategy deteriorates and becomes commoditized.

I learned that fighting on the chess board could also have an impact on the political climate in the country.

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.

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

An hour's history of two minds is well told in a game of chess.

By this measure (on the gap between Fischer & his contemporaries), I consider him the greatest world champion

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did.

Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.

I see my own style as being a symbiosis of the styles of Alekhine, Tal and Fischer.

A chess problem is genuine mathematics, but it is in some way "trivial" mathematics. However, ingenious and intricate, however original and surprising the moves, there is something essential lacking. Chess problems are unimportant. The best mathematics is serious as well as beautiful-"important" if you like, but the word is very ambiguous, and "serious" expresses what I mean much better.

Any experienced player knows how a change in the character of the play influences your psychological mood.

If you wish to succeed, you must brave the risk of failure.

The legend of the best player of chess has been destroyed.

A passed pawn increase in strength as the number of pieces on the board diminishes.

By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values.

The game gives us a satisfaction that Life denies us. And for the Chess player, the success which crowns his work, the great dispeller of sorrows, is named 'combination'.