Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected.

In chess, bigamy is acceptable but monarchy is absolute.

I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.

Paolo Bacigalupi

Training in analysis (like any other form of chess training) should be treated very seriously.

For chess, that superb, cold, infinitely satisfying anodyne to life, I feel the ardour of a lover, the humility of a disciple.

H. Russell Wakefield

Chess is ruthless: you've got to be prepared to kill people.

There is not a single true chess-player in the world whose heart does not beat faster at the mere sound of such long beloved and familiar words as 'gambit games'.

David Bronstein

The laws of chess do not permit a free choice: you have to move whether you like it or not.

It [chess] is eminently and emphatically the philosopher's game.

These children... well, they have no concept. None. All they want to do is win. That is your culture. America spoils chess, as it spoils all things. Art? What art? Winning, all you Americans can think of is winning. Winning and getting rich. Your country is too young to have so much power. Too immature. Yet, because of your power, everybody pays attention. Everybody. You are teaching the world that only one thing matters!

Stephen L. Carter

Anyone who wishes to learn how to play chess well must make himself or herself thoroughly conversant with the play in positions where the players have castled on opposite sides.

Alexander Kotov

In a riddle whose answer is chess, what is the only prohibited word?

Jorge Luis Borges

My life was in crisis. All my values were becoming meaningless. I was discovering that my chosen profession was empty, foolish, as useless as—as playing chess.

Robert Silverberg

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'.

He who fears an isolated Queen's Pawn should give up Chess.

Siegbert Tarrasch

A friendship across sectarian lines is not a common phenomenon, in his experience. In the past, it has struck him that, apart from homosexuals, only chess players have found a reliable way to bridge, intensely but without fatal violence, the gulf that separates any given pair of men.

Scientists are a friendly, atheistic, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.

Do you play chess, by the by? asked Vance.
Used to. But no more. A beautiful game, though—if it wasn't for the players.

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.

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