Chess Player Quotes

“Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.”

— Ralph Charell

“The strategist is a chess player thrown into life.”

— VIRGIL PROFEANU

“I'm not much of a chess player, but there is an aspect of the game that I find fascinating. After a while, you can almost see lines of force between the pieces. Areas of danger where it is physically impossible to move pieces into. Clouds of possibility, forbidden zones.”

— Hannu Rajaniemi

“Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.”

— C.S. Lewis

“Ralph ... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.”

— William Golding

“If, in our first match for the world champion's title, I had managed to make the score 6-0, there would have been no Kasparov as a good chess player at all.”

— Anatoly Karpov

“She felt like a chess player who, by the clever handling of his pieces, sees the game taking the course intended. Her eyes were bright and tender with a smile as they glanced up into his; and her lips looked hungry for the kiss which they invited.”

— Kate Chopin

“The captain was a good chess player, and the games were always interesting. Yossarian had stopped playing chess with him because the games were so interesting they were foolish.”

— Joseph Heller

“Once you're a chess player, you spend a lot of time thinking about the game and you can't get it completely out of your head.”

— Magnus Carlsen

“My father, a fine chess player himself, has been a massive influence throughout my life.”

— Magnus Carlsen

“Whoever sees no other aim in the game than that of giving checkmate to one's opponent will never become a good Chess player.”

— Max Euwe

“I was very lucky that while I was a chess player in a country where chess was not a big deal, I happened to be in the one city where there was a sprouting chess team: Chennai.”

— Viswanathan Anand

“I don't know how many calories an average chess player burns per game, but it often exceeds that of a player in ball games. It is not only the chess as such: You need to be fit and undergo complicated preparation.”

— Viswanathan Anand

“I believe every chess player senses beauty, when he succeeds in creating situations, which contradict the expectations and the rules, and he succeeds in mastering this situation.”

— Vladimir Kramnik

“For what it was worth, she got the impression that Niessa liked her, or at least approved of her, in the same way a chess-player approves of one of his pieces when it stays where it's been put and doesn't go wandering off all over the board.”

— K.J. Parker

“I'm a pretty good chess player.”

— Joel Kinnaman

“The chess player who develops the ability to play two dozen boards at a time will benefit from learning to compress his or her analysis into less time.”

— Marilyn Vos Savant

“During terms, Professor Marsden lives in Cambridge with his wife, chess player
extraordinaire and distinguished physician and surgeon Bryony Asquith Marsden. His
favorite time of day is half past six in the evening, when he meets Mrs. Marsden's train at the
station, as the latter returns from her day in London. On Sunday afternoons, rain or shine,
Professor and Mrs. Marsden take a walk along The Backs, and treasure growing old
together.”

— Sherry Thomas

“I spend around one hour per day on physical exercise. Exercise is a must for every chess player. As the proverb says, 'A sound mind in a sound body'.”

— Humpy Koneru

“Analysis, if it is really carried out with a complete concentration of his powers, forms and completes a chess player.”

— Lev Polugaevsky

“Analysis is a glittering opportunity for training: it is just here that capacity for work, perseverence and stamina are cultivated, and these qualities are, in truth, as necessary to a chess player as a marathon runner.”

— Lev Polugaevsky

“As a chess player one has to be able to control one's feelings, one has to be as cold as a machine.”

— Levon Aronian

“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

“Independence of thought is a most valuable quality in a chess-player, both at the board and when preparing for a game.”

— David Bronstein

“To play a match for the World Championship is the cherished dream of every chess player.”

— David Bronstein

“There's never before been a Chess player with such a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of the game and such an absolutely indomitable will to win. I think Bobby is the greatest player that ever lived”

— Lisa Lane

“We perceive after a careful consideration of the evolution of the chess mind that such evolution has gone on, in general, in a way quite similar to that in which it goes on with the individual chess player, only with the latter more rapidly.”

— Richard Reti

“A knowledge of tactics is the foundation of positional play. This is a rule which has stood its test in chess history and one which we cannot impress forcibly enough upon the young chess player. A beginner should avoid Queen's Gambit and French Defence and play open games instead! While he may not win as many games at first, he will in the long run be amply compensated by acquiring a thorough knowledge of the game”

— Richard Reti

“It is a delight to watch a young and gifted chess player. To him have come no sinister experiences; to him continual carping care is foreign. Therefore he loves the attack and the bold sacrifice; for theirin lies the shortest way to his ultimate objective.”

— Richard Reti

“Chess hasn't really influenced my literature. It's true, there's a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it's more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.”

— Dumitru Tepeneag

“For me, Chess is life and every game is like a new life. Every chess player gets to live many lives in one lifetime.”

— Eduard Gufeld

“I don't consider myself a particularly young chess player. I have been playing in the best tournaments in the world since I was 16 years old. In other sports, if you have been playing for seven years, you are not a young prodigy any more. You're one of the pros.”

— Magnus Carlsen

“Could we look into the head of a Chess player, we should see there a whole world of feelings, images, ideas, emotion and passion”

— Alfred Binet

“It's turns out to be much easier to simulate a grandmaster chess player than it is to simulate a 2-year-old.”

— Alison Gopnik

“Genius is a starry word; but if there ever was a chess player to whom that attribute applied, it was Paul Morphy.”

— Andrew Soltis

“A Soviet diplomat, like a skilled chess player, does not expect his opposite number to give up something for nothing, not even a pawn.”

— Arthur Dean

“A chess player never has a heart attack in a good position.”

— Bent Larsen

“Don't worry kids, you'll find work. After all, my machine will need strong chess player-programmers. You will be the first.”

— Mikhail Botvinnik

“Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player”

— Siegbert Tarrasch

“When I used to go to the Manhattan Chess Club back in the fifties, I met a lot of old-timers there who knew Capablanca, because he used to come around to the Manhattan club in the forties - before he died in the early forties. They spoke about Capablanca with awe. I have never seen people speak about any chess player like that, before or since.”

— Bobby Fischer

“The enormous mental resilience, without which no Chess player can exist, was so much taken up by Chess that he could never free his mind of this game”

— Albert Einstein

“There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage , and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind.”

— Edgar Allan Poe

“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

“When a chess player looks at the board, he does not see a static mosaic, a 'still life', but a magnetic field of forces, charged with energy - as Faraday saw the stresses surrounding magnets and currents as curves in space; or as Van Gogh saw vortices in the skies of Provence.”

— Arthur Koestler

“The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism ...”

— Pat Robertson

“A strong memory, concentration, imagination, and a strong will is required to become a great Chess player”

— Bobby Fischer

“The highest Art of the Chess player lies in not allowing your Opponent to show you what he can do.”

— Garry Kasparov

“Every good mathematician should also be a good chess player and vice versa.”

— Henri Poincare

“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

“I learned a lot. I really did. Millennium is a state of mind. I always thought of Frank Black as the greatest chess player that could take random pieces of information and string them together into a scenario that was accurate. I never thought of him as a psychic at all. We need people like that.”

— Lance Henriksen