Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

Volodymyr Zelensky

Alexander Alekhine

Bobby Fischer

Magnus Carlsen

Maurice Ashley

Charles Dudley Warner

Marcel Duchamp

Large empires have always used smaller countries for their own interests. But, in this political chess match, I will not let Ukraine be a pawn.

Volodymyr Zelensky

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

Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.

Alexander Alekhine

I get more upset at losing at other things than chess. I always get upset when I lose at Monopoly.

There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

Charles Dudley Warner

I see myself more as an ambassador of the game. And I hope to bring chess to a higher level in the United States. Making bigger tournaments, more interesting events. Making it a respectable profession for young people to be able to pursue in the future.

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 object to being called a chess genius because I consider myself to be an all around genius who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he's like an idiot savant. Outside of chess he knows nothing.

It is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man has yet said "Mate!" in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent bitter, boastful and malicious.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

George Bernard Shaw

I played Chess with him and would have beaten him sometimes only he always took back his last move, and ran the game out differently

The man of system is apt to be very wise in his own conceit. In the great chess board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

G. K. Chesterton

I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved.

Søren Kierkegaard

To venture an opinion is like moving a piece at chess: it may be taken, but it forms the beginning of a game that is won.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Some play at chess, some at cards, some at the Stock Exchange. I prefer to play at Cause and Effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions, for life is a kind of chess.

Benjamin Franklin

Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

G. K. Chesterton

There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.

Edgar Allan Poe

Chess has this in common with making poetry; that the desire for it comes upon the amateur in gusts.

If the weather is too cold or rainy, I take shelter in the Regence Cafe, where I entertain myself by watching chess being played. Paris is the world center, and this cafe is the Paris centre for the finest skill at this game.

The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess.

Edgar Allan Poe

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably.

The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind.

Edgar Allan Poe

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

Thomas Jefferson