Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

Unlike every other product that is now manufactured for the table, wine exists in as many varieties as there are people who produce it. Variations in technique, climate, grape, soil and culture ensure that wine is, to the ordinary drinker, the most unpredictable of drinks, and to the connoisseur the most intricately informative, responding to its origins like a game of chess to its opening move.

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

Vladimir Nabokov

It is annoying that the rules of chess do not allow a pawn to take either horizontally or backwards, but only forwards... This psychological tuning is ideal for attacking purposes, but what about for defence?

David Bronstein

Chess problems are the hymn-tunes of mathematics.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

Steven Johnson (author)

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

It would be as naive to study the song of the nightingale, as it would be ridiculous to try and win a King's Gambit against a representative of the old chess guard.

David Bronstein

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

But compared with the task of selecting a piece of French pastry held by an impatient waiter a move in chess is like reaching for a salary check in its demand on the contemplative faculties.

Robert Benchley

I'm not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.

Hannu Rajaniemi

A character, to be acceptable as more than a chess piece, has to be ignorant of the future, unsure about the past, and not at all sure of what he's supposed to be doing.

Anthony Burgess

All opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.

Independence of thought is a most valuable quality in a chess-player, both at the board and when preparing for a game.

David Bronstein

I will say only that if a chess problem is, in the crude sense, 'useless', then that is equally true of most of the best mathematics; that very little of mathematics is useful practically, and that the little [that is] is comparatively dull.

Mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is — sometimes — turn out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called "physical universe." That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess.

Robert A. Heinlein

Human affairs are like a chess game. Only those who do not take it seriously can be called good players.

Mathematics is not best learned passively; you don't sop it up like a romance novel. You've got to go out to it, aggressive, and alert, like a chess master pursuing checkmate.

Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.

The wisdom of the chess player is displayed more in winning over a capable opponent than a novice. The wisdom of the general is displayed more in defeating a superior army than in subduing an inferior one. Even more so, the wisdom of God is displayed when He brings good to us and glory to Himself out of confusion and calamity rather than out of pleasant times.

Chess is like a delicious drug which offers such heavenly delights that they can never tear themselves away from it completely.

Chess reflects the real world in miniature. Endeavor, struggle, success, and defeat - they are part of each game ever played.

Bruce Pandolfini

It is a delight to watch a young and gifted chess player. To him have come no sinister experiences; to him continual carping care is foreign. Therefore he loves the attack and the bold sacrifice; for theirin lies the shortest way to his ultimate objective.

The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four"... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.

Jorge Luis Borges

Throughout my chess career I sought out new challenges, looking for things no one had done before.