Chess Quotes

246 Sourced quotes

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.

Chess never has been and never can be aught but a recreation. It should not be indulged in to the detriment of other and more serious avocations.

You sit at the board and suddenly your heart leaps. Your hand trembles to pick up the piece and move it. But what chess teaches you is that you must sit there calmly and think about whether it's really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas.

Stanley Kubrick

There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.

It would be three-dimensional chess with a million billion squares and a million pieces, and with the rules changing ever move.

Clifford D. Simak

To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Tournament chess is not relaxing. It's stressful, even if you win.

Jennifer Shahade

They [Richter always works on a number of his abstract paintings at a the same time] feed off one another... At the beginning, I feel totally free, and it's fun, like being a child. The paintings can look good for a day or an hour. Over time, they change. In the end, you become like a chess player. It takes me longer than some people to recognize their quality, their situation - to realize when they are finished. Finally, one day I enter the room and say, 'Checkmate.' Then sometimes I need a break, a quiet job, like a landscape. But I always need to paint abstracts again. I need that pleasure.

Gerhard Richter

Litigation is the pursuit of practical ends, not a game of chess.

Felix Frankfurter

Captivated by its discipline, humanity forgets and goes on forgetting that it is the discipline of chess players, not of angels.

Jorge Luis Borges

Game theory applies to a very different type of conflict, now technically called a game. The well-known games such as poker, chess, ticktacktoe and so forth are games in the strict technical Bark and counterbark sense. But what makes parlor games games is not their entertainment value or detachment from real life.

Anatol Rapoport