Emanuel Lasker Quotes

#1. None of the great players has been so incomprehensible to the majority of amateurs and even masters, as Emanuel Lasker.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#2. No other great master has been so misunderstood by the vast majority of chess amateurs and even by many masters, as has Emanuel Lasker.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#3. 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.

Emanuel Lasker

#4. I keep on fighting as long as my opponent can make a mistake.

Emanuel Lasker

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

Emanuel Lasker

#6. Show me three lines of the opening theory moves and I will prove to you that two of them are incorrect.

Emanuel Lasker

#7. The hardest game to win is a won game

Emanuel Lasker

#8. Without error, there is no brilliancy.

Emanuel Lasker

#9. The fatal hour of this ancient game is approaching. In its modern form this game will soon die a drawing death - the inevitable victory of certainty and mechanization will leave its stamp on the fate of chess.

Emanuel Lasker

#10. In itself the title of world champion does not give any significicant advantages, if it is not acknowledged by the entire chess world, and a champion who does not have the chess world behind him is, in my view, a laughing-stock.

Emanuel Lasker

#11. In Chess, as it is played by masters, chance is practically eliminated.

Emanuel Lasker

#12. Vanity should never tempt a player to engage in a combat at the risk of loss of health. It is bad enough to lose without the additional annoyance of paying doctors' bills.

Emanuel Lasker

#13. The combination player thinks forward; he starts from the given position, and tries the forceful moves in his mind

Emanuel Lasker

#14. Without error there can be no brilliancy

Emanuel Lasker

#15. Truth derives its strength not so much from itself as from the brilliant contrast it makes with what is only apparently true. This applies especially to Chess, where it is often found that the profoundest moves do not much startle the imagination.

Emanuel Lasker

#16. When you see a good move, look for a better one

Emanuel Lasker

#17. He who has a slight disadvantage plays more attentively, inventively and more boldly than his antagonist who either takes it easy or aspires after too much. Thus a slight disadvantage is very frequently seen to convert into a good, solid advantage.

Emanuel Lasker

#18. In mathematics, if I find a new approach to a problem, another mathematician might claim that he has a better, more elegant solution. In chess, if anybody claims he is better than I, I can checkmate him.

Emanuel Lasker

#19. By positional play a master tries to prove and exploit true values, whereas by combinations he seeks to refute false values ... A combination produces an unexpected re-assessment of values.

Emanuel Lasker

#20. While the Baroque rules of Chess could only have been created by humans, the rules of Go are so elegant, organic, and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe, they almost certainly play Go.

Emanuel Lasker

#21. Do not permit yourself to fall in love with the end-game play to the exclusion of entire games. It is well to have the whole story of how it happened; the complete play, not the denouement only. Do not embrace the rag-time and vaudeville of chess.

Emanuel Lasker

#22. 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.

Emanuel Lasker

#23. I believe in magic ... There is magic in the creative faculty such as great poets and philosophers conspicuously possess, and equally in the creative chessmaster.

Emanuel Lasker

#24. An advantage could consist not only in a single important advantage but also in a multitude of insignificant advantages.

Emanuel Lasker

#25. A chess game, after all, is a fight in which all possible factors must be made use of, and in which a knowledge of the opponent's good and bad qualities is of the greatest importance.

Emanuel Lasker

#26. I have known many chess players, but among them there has been only one genius - Capablanca!

Emanuel Lasker

#27. The range of circumstances in which it is possible to presuppose the presence of a combination is very limited. The presence of such circumstances is the reason for the genesis of the idea in the master's brain.

Emanuel Lasker

#28. On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite.

Emanuel Lasker

#29. Show me three variations in the leading handbook on the openings, and I will show you two of those three that are defective.

Emanuel Lasker

#30. Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized ...

Emanuel Lasker

#31. To refer to the oft mooted question, "Which piece is stronger, the Bishop or the Knight?" it is clear that the value of the Bishop undergoes greater changes than that of the Knight.

Emanuel Lasker

#32. Chess is neither a science nor an art. It is what human nature most delights in
a fight.

Emanuel Lasker

#33. 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'.

Emanuel Lasker

#34. Steinitz was a thinker worthy of a seat in the halls of a university. A player, as the world believed he was, he was not; his studious temperament made that impossible; and thus he was conquered by a player and in the end little valued by the world, he died.

Emanuel Lasker

#35. I have added these principles to the law: get the Knights into action before both Bishops are developed

Emanuel Lasker

#36. Loss generally occurs when a player overrates his advantage or for other reasons seeks to derive from a minute advantage a great return such as a forced win.

Emanuel Lasker

#37. To find the right plan is just as hard as looking for its sound justification.

Emanuel Lasker

#38. By what right does White, in an absolutely even position, such as after move one, when both sides have advanced 1. e4, sacrifice a pawn, whose recapture is quite uncertain, and open up his kingside to attack? And then follow up this policy by leaving the check of the black queen open? None whatever!

Emanuel Lasker

#39. The process of making pieces in Chess do something useful (whatever it may be) has received a special name: it is called the attack. The attack is that process by means of which you remove obstructions.

Emanuel Lasker