Great Chess Sayings

#1. The first great chess players, including the world champion, got by perfectly well without constant coaches.

Anatoly Karpov

#2. A strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will is required to become a great Chess player

Bobby Fischer

#3. Capablanca was snatched too early from the chess world. With his death we have lost a great chess genius, the like of whom we will never see again.

Alexander Alekhine

#4. A great chess player always has a very good memory.

Leonid Shamkovich

#5. By all means examine the games of the great chess players, but don't swallow them whole. Their games are valuable not for their separate moves, but for their vision of chess, their way of thinking.

Anatoly Karpov

#6. It is not possible to become a great player without having learned how to analyse deeply and accurately.

Mark Dvoretsky

#7. The sign of a great Master is his ability to win a won game quickly and painlessly

Irving Chernev

#8. Las Vegas is a beautiful place. I like it more and more and plan to be here often. It's a great place for chess.

Anatoly Karpov

#9. 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

#10. Throughout chess history, great debates have raged about the pros and cons of hanging pawns. The debates are nonsense; the answer is cut and dried. If the pawns can be attacked and forced to move forward, they are weak. If they can be defended and remain where they are, they are strong.

Yasser Seirawan

#11. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people who really enjoy chess are the dubs and the duffers, experts who have resigned their ambitions, those who play only for pastime, and, of course, the great fraternity of the kibbitzers.

Alfred Kreymborg

#12. Chess is a great game. No matter how good one is, there is always somebody better. No matter how bad one is, there is always somebody worse.

Israel Albert Horowitz

#13. During the course of many years I have observed that a great number of doctors, lawyers, and important businessmen make a habit of visiting a chess club during the late afternoon or evening to relax and find relief from the preoccupations of their work.

Jose Raul Capablanca

#14. When you are drawing, you are always one or two marks ahead. You're always thinking, 'After what I'm doing here I'll go there, and there.' It's like chess or something. In drawing I've always thought economy of means was a great quality - not always in painting, but always in drawing.

Martin Gayford

#15. I claim that nothing else is so effective in encouraging the growth of chess strength as such independent analysis, both of the games of the great players and your own.

Mikhail Botvinnik

#16. In expert tennis, 80% of the points are won, while in amateur tennis, 80% are lost. The same is true for wrestling, chess, and investing: Beginners should focus on avoiding mistakes, experts on making great moves." Erik Falkenstein

Lucas Carlson

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

Jose Raul Capablanca

#18. The 'chess machine', by which admiring title he had been known, revealed the great drawback of a machine: it had not sufficient flexibility to adapt itself to altered circumstances.

Max Euwe

#19. Television is like speed chess, as you have no time and no money. It is like trying to play Grandmaster chess with a 20 minute timer. The rewards are great, though, as it moves faster and you get to see the finished results much quicker.

Dean Devlin

#20. Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary.

Bent Larsen

#21. Next to the intellectual stimulation of chess, the educational value is of great importance. Chess teaches logic, imagination, self-discipline, and determination.

Garry Kasparov

#22. Fischer, the great American chess champion, famously said, 'Chess is life.' I would say, 'Pi is life.'

Daniel Tammet

#23. Hell wasn't a major reservoir of evil, any more then Heaven, in Crowley's opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.

Terry Pratchett

#24. I also found out why I should never reveal the "why" to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.

Amy Tan

#25. His teaching became a turning point in chess history: it was from Steinitz that the era of modern chess began. The contribution of the first world champion to its development is comparable with the great scientific discoveries of the 19th century.

Garry Kasparov

#26. Her sigh felt dragged from the depths of her soul. Great. Working for Bump again.

Stacia Kane

#27. A great deal of the pupils time was spent going through, once again, the History of the Communist (Bolshevik) Party of the Soviet Union. He had learnt it at elementary school; at secondary school; at his sports club; at the Komsomol; at the university; at a folk dancing course; at the chess-club.

George Mikes

#28. Everyone at a high level has a huge amount of chess understanding, and much of what separates the great from the very good is deep presence, relaxation of the conscious mind, which allows the unconscious to flow unhindered.

Josh Waitzkin

#29. It's a great huge game of chess that's being played
all over the world
if this is the world at all, you know. Oh, what fun it is! How I wish I was one of them! I wouldn't mind being a Pawn, if only I might join
though of course I should like to be a Queen, best.

Lewis Carroll

#30. Nowadays young people have great choice of occupations, hobbies, etc, so chess is experiencing difficulties because of the high competition. Now it's hard to make living in chess, so our profession does attract young people.

Boris Spassky

#31. A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.

William Hazlitt

#32. A win gives one a feeling of self-affirmation, and success - a feeling of self-expression, but only a sensible harmonization between these urges can bring really great achievements in chess.

Oleg Romanishin

#33. It can't be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.

Terry Pratchett

#34. In my opinion, the style of a player should not be formed under the influence of any single great master.

Vasily Smyslov

#35. He can be regarded as the great master of simplification. The art of resolving the tension at the critical moment and in the most effacious way so as to clarify the position as desired is Capablanca's own.

Max Euwe

#36. 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

#37. Women, by their nature, are not exceptional chess players: they are not great fighters.

Garry Kasparov

#38. The study of typical plans is something that the leading grandmasters devote a great deal of time to. I would say that the most far-seeing of them devote as much time to this as to the study of openings.

Alexander Kotov

#39. The fact that a knight is temporarily on the edge of the board is of no great significance.

Anatoly Karpov

#40. Haste, the great enemy.

Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

#41. Every great master will find it useful to have his own theory on the openings, which only he himself knows, a theory which is closely linked with plans for the middle game.

Mikhail Botvinnik

#42. Playing black, I put great stake in the Ruy Lopez: I liked it, feel it, and understand it; in matches with Hjartarson and Timman it served me well. - on preparing for World Championship versus Garry Kasparov

Anatoly Karpov

#43. A championship contender in the early twentieth century needed charisma and a knack for cultivating sponsorship, and Rubinstein was the epitome of the shy and unsocial chess player. Now matter how great his chess skills, he lacked the people skills to be a self-promoter and fund-raiser.

Garry Kasparov

#44. I honestly don't read that much. Obviously I read chess books - in terms of favorites, Kasparov's 'My Great Predecessors' is pretty good.

Magnus Carlsen