Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

The world is a game of chess; the loser loses and the winner wins.

Jamal-al-Din Afghani

In tournaments it is not enough to be a connoisseur of chess; one must also play well.

Siegbert Tarrasch

To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

Malcolm Gladwell

Karpov, Kasparov, Korchnoi have absolutely destroyed chess by their immoral, unethical, prearranged games. These guys are really the lowest dogs around, and if people knew the truth about them, they would be held in more contempt than Ben Johnson, the runner, and they're going to know the truth when I do this book!

The art is French, but the ideas may have come from anywhere, like the game of chess which the pilgrims or crusaders brought home from Syria. In the oriental game, the King was followed step by step by a Minister whose functions were personal. The crusaders freed the piece from control; gave it liberty to move up or down or diagonally, forwards and backwards; made it the most arbitrary and formidable champion on the board, while the King and the Knight were the most restricted in movement; and this piece they named Queen and called the Virgin.

It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.

... in 2000, when I defeated Alexei Shirov at the World Chess Championship in Teheran to become the first Indian ever to win the title.

Viswanathan Anand

In our small chess community in Marylebone it would be mock modesty on my part to deny that I have built up for myself a considerable name without ever actually having won a single game. Even the best players are sometimes beaten, and that is precisely what happens to me.

DO YOU HEAR ME? I now screamed to the heavens, driving this information into the deepest crevices of my mind. I, VICTOR EDMUNDO VILLASEÑOR, TAKE THIS HOLY OATH BEFORE YOU, GOD ALMIGHTY, as your son, to write my people's story WITH ALL MY HEART AND SOUL! I'll write! I'll do my part with all the power and intensity that I put into wrestling, hunting, trying to castrate myself, and chess!

Victor Villaseñor

[Bragg asserts that] In sodium chloride there appear to be no molecules represented by NaCl. The equality in number of sodium and chlorine atoms is arrived at by a chess-board pattern of these atoms; it is a result of geometry and not of a pairing-off of the atoms.

Of William Henry Bragg

Henry Edward Armstrong

Be warned! From Satan's viewpoint you are a pawn in his game of cosmic chess.

One can imagine a world without essays. It would be a little poorer, of course, like a world without chess, but one could live in it.

One minute I was playing chess and doing maths all the time, the next I had been rerouted into more 'normal' girls' activities: reading, writing stories and worrying about my clothes.

Scarlett Thomas

Life is a game of chess and you never really know when you are winning or losing.

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Tactics involve calculations that can tax the human brain, but when you boil them down, they are actually the simplest part of chess and are almost trivial compared to strategy.

Film-making encompasses everything, from tricking people into investing in it, to putting on the show, to trying to distill down to moments in time, and ape reality but send this other message. It's got everything. When I was a kid I loved to draw, and I loved my electric football sets, and I painted little things and made sculptures and did matte painting and comic books and illustrated stuff, and took pictures, had a darkroom, loved to tape-record stuff. It's all of that. It's not having to grow up. It's four-dimensional chess, it's strategy, and it's being painfully honest, and unbelievably deceitful, and everything in between.

Like looking down on a lubricious chess set, isn't it? The king moves in tiny steps, with no direction, like a drunkard trying to avoid the archer's bolt. The others work their strategies and wait for the old man to fall. He has no power, yet all power moves in his orbit and to his mad whim. Do you know there's no fool piece on the chessboard, Kent?" "Methinks the fool is the player, the mind above the moves.

Christopher Moore

Remy you're my king." I hug him hard. "There's no chess game for me without you.

By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight.

Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player.

Siegbert Tarrasch

Our efforts in chess attain only a hundredth of one percent of their rightful result... Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values.

Good decision-making is like playing chess and you must avoid making hasty decisions without thinking of how that particular decision will impact on different aspects of your work and organization. The worst kind of decision-making is to decide to delay a difficult decision until later or to pass it to someone else to have to make. You will never excel and be valued by your colleagues if you get into these habits of procrastination and passing responsibility to others.

Nigel Cumberland

I was born in the East Indies, once the cradle of poetry, philosophy and history and now their tomb. I belong to that race which composed the Mahabharata and invented chess. But this nation which made codes of it's poems and formulated politics in a game is no longer alive! It survives imprisoned in it's own country. I asked for India liberty and light; as for myself, more happy than my countrymen, i am free - civis sum.

Francisco Luís Gomes

The profuse phallic symbolism of chess provides some fantasy gratification of the homosexual wish, particularly the desire for mutual masturbation.

Life is a thing to be lived, not spent; to be faced, not ordered. Life is not a game of chess, the victory to the most knowing; it is a game of cards, one's hand by skill to be made the best of.

Jerome K. Jerome