Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

Those chess lovers who ask me how many moves I usually calculate in advance, when making a combination, are always astonished when I reply, quite truthfully, 'as a rule not a single one'

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

Viswanathan Anand

It's become clear that absolutely everyone is either an art major or a science major at heart. No English or communications or business or politics or whatever: Only art and science. I'm an art major, I think. We can still play chess together, you know?

But whatever you might say and whatever I might say, a machine which can play chess with people is one of the most marvellous wonders of our 20th century!

David Bronstein

No matter what the name, we're all the same pieces in one big chess game.

Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children's play, or as manifestation of the end or goal of work, as in "playing" chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfillment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for.

I knew that our time together was almost over, I asked her if she liked sports, she asked me if I liked chess, I asked her if she liked fallen trees, she went home with her father, the center of me followed her, but I was left with the shell of me, I needed to see her again, I couldn't explain my need to myself, and that's why it was such a beautiful need, there's nothing wrong with not understanding yourself.

Jonathan Safran Foer

Charles Babbage proposed to make an automaton chess-player which should register mechanically the number of games lost and gained in consequence of every sort of move. Thus, the longer the automaton went on playing game, the more experienced it would become by the accumulation of experimental results. Such a machine precisely represents the acquirement of experience by our nervous organization.

William Stanley Jevons

I can remember times coming home from a chess club at four in the morning when I was half asleep and half dead and forcing myself to pray an hour and study (the Bible) an hour. You know, I was half out of my head-stoned almost.

We assert that it is possible to describe analytically any human function which can be reasonably defined in objective terms and we specifically include in such functions "thinking" insofar as that term is definable. If by "thinking" one means being able to do arithmetic, or play a good game of chess, or learn from experience, or make optimal decisions in exceedingly complex situations, then we assert that thinking can be described analytically. And there are two important corollaries: if It can be described analytically, it can be simulated; and if it can be simulated, it can be performed mechanically.

Robert E. Machol

The Chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chessboard, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem

Caissa, the goddess of chess, had punished me for my conservative play, for betraying my nature.

We may hope that machines will eventually compete with men in all purely intellectual fields. But which are the best ones to start with? Many people think that a very abstract activity, like the playing of chess, would be best. It can also be maintained that it is best to provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English.

Coaching secrets? I don't think I got any. The main "secret" – love for chess.

He was the captain of the chess club and an A-plus student. – Nick Why would anyone think he's a demon? – Tate The world is insane, and you're asking me for the reasoning of a psycho? I'm not a profiler. – Acheron

Sherrilyn Kenyon

I collected 599 pictures of Elizabeth Taylor — some people find that obsessive. I collected 599. Not 600, but 599. I feel that genius and obsession be the same thing. It is rare when a woman is driven by obsession. Similarly, it is rare when a woman is a genius. That's why I said one of my most notorious sentences, that there is no woman Mozart because there is no woman Jack the Ripper. Men are more prone to obsession because they are fleeing domination by women. They flee to a chess game or to a computer or to fixing a car, or whatever, to attempt to complete their identities, because they always feel incomplete.

Use art, be creative. No more war. No more children dying. A pawn that does not move in chess upsets the game. I know there is love in the world still and that is what I wish to surround myself with. Sacrifice your time and energy into something positive instead of the negative and you will see that change around you.

Lorin Morgan-Richards

Doctors, chess grand masters and football quarterbacks share a trait: the ability to recognize patterns and learn from them. A doctor can connect symptoms to causes and use that to make a diagnosis and offer a prescription. Top quarterbacks and grand masters can sense the shape of unfolding play, and profit from that knowledge.
Great managers are also skilled at pattern recognition. Every industry is reshaped by patterns of strategic change that can dramatically shift profit and power.

Adrian Slywotzky

He was always moving, advancing into new regions he had never seen before. A constantly unfolding panorama of sights and scenes, frozen landscapes spread out ahead. All objects were fixed. Pieces on a vast chess board through which he moved, arms folded, face calm. A detached observer who saw objects that lay ahead of him as clearly as those under foot.
Right now, as he crouched in the small supply closet, he saw an unusually varied multitude of scenes for the next half hour. Much lay ahead. The half hour was divided into an incredibly complex pattern of separate configurations. He had reached a critical region; he was about to move through worlds of intricate complexity.

Malina looked incredulous. "Are you anything more than a Druid?" "Of course I am. I own this shop and I play a mean game of chess, and I've been told that I'm a frakkin' Cylon." "What's a frakkin' Cylon?" "I don't know, but it sounds really scary when you say it with a Polish Accent.

You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think.

Russian activists and journalists who get enough death threats and take them sufficiently seriously to hire bodyguards are also usually careful about what they ingest. Soon after the chess champion Garry Kasparov quit the sport to go into politics full time, in 2004, he hired a team of eight bodyguards, who not only accompanied him everywhere but also carried drinking water and food for Kasparov to eat at meals shared in public. Three years ago, Kasparov told me that what he liked most about foreign travel was being able to shed his bodyguards for a while. A year after that, threats drove him to leave Russia permanently.

In conclusion, if you want to unravel the multitude of secrets of chess then don't begrudge the time.

Mathematics, like chess, requires too direct and personal a confrontation to allow graceful defeat.

I once heard of a murderer who propped his two victims up against a chess board in sporting attitudes and was able to get as far as Seattle before his crime was discovered.

Robert Benchley