HemmersChess

“Chess demands total concentration”

- Bobby Fischer

“You may learn much more from a game you lose than from a game you win. You will have to lose hundreds of games before becoming a good player. ”

- Jose Raul Capablanca

“The Pawns are the soul of the game.”

- Francois Andre Danican Philido

“Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Good positions don\'t win games, good moves do. ”

- Gerald Abrahams

“Help your pieces so they can help you. ”

- Paul Morphy

“A win by an unsound combination, however showy, fills me with artistic horror”

- Wilhelm Steinitz

“My style is somewhere between that of Tal and Petrosian. ”

- Reshevsky

“Many Chess players were surprised when after the game, Fischer quietly explained: \'I had already analyzed this possibility\' in a position which I thought was not possible to foresee from the opening”

- Mikhail Tal

“Of all my Russian books, the defense contains and diffuses the greatest \'warmth\' which may seem odd seeing how supremely abstract Chess is supposed to be”

- Vladimir Nabokov

“Every Pawn is a potential Queen”

- James Mason

“When you see a good move, look for a better one”

- Emanuel Lasker

“Bobby just drops the pieces and they fall on the right squares”

- Miguel Najdorf

“Capture of the adverse King is the ultimate but not the first object of the game. ”

- William Steinitz

“One bad move nullifies forty good ones”

- Horowitz

“Is Bobby Fischer quite sane?”

- Salo Flohr

“Fischer is the strongest player in the world. In fact, the strongest player who ever lived”

- Larry Evans

“Though most people love to look at the games of the great attacking masters, some of the most successful players in history have been the quiet positional players. They slowly grind you down by taking away your space, tying up your pieces, and leaving you with virtually nothing to do!”

- Yasser Seirawan

“No price is too great for the scalp of the enemy King. ”

- Koblentz

“The passed Pawn is a criminal, who should be kept under lock and key. Mild measures, such as police surveillance, are not sufficient. ”

- Aaron Nimzovich

“Becoming successful at Chess allows you to discover your own personality. That\'s what I want for the kids I teach”

- Saudin Robovic

“Discovered check is the dive bomber of the Chessboard”

- Reuben Fine

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

- Emanuel Lasker

“In life, as in Chess, one\'s own Pawns block one.\' way. A man\'s very wealth, ease, leisure, children, books, which should help him to win, more often checkmate him”

- Charles Buxton

“Chess is like war on a board”

- Bobby Fischer

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

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Examine moves that smite! A good eye for smites is far more important than a knowledge of strategical principles”

- Purdy

“Tactics flow from a superior position”

- Bobby Fischer

“The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move”

- David Bronstein

“Morphy was probably the greatest genius of them all”

- Bobby Fischer

“In complicated positions, Bobby Fischer hardly had to be afraid of anybody”

- Paul Keres

“Some part of a mistake is always correct”

- Savielly Tartakover

“Chess is so inspiring that I do not believe a good player is capable of having an evil thought during the game”

- Wilhelm Steinitz

“I have added these principles to the law: get the Knights into action before both Bishops are developed”

- Emanuel Lasker

“Chess is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money”

- Benjamin Franklin

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

- Ralph Charell

“Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity”

- Vladimir Nabokov

“Chess is the art which expresses the science of logic”

- Mikhail Botvinnik

“As one by one I mowed them down, my superiority soon became apparent”

- Jose Capablanca

“It\'s just you and your opponent at the board and you\'re trying to prove something”

- Bobby Fischer

“I\'m not afraid of Spassky. The world knows I\'m the best. You don\'t need a match to prove it”

- Bobby Fischer

“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

“On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long ”

- Emanuel Lasker

“The sign of a great Master is his ability to win a won game quickly and painlessly”

- Irving Chernev

“To avoid losing a piece, many a person has lost the game”

- Savielly Tartakover

“Chess is a cold bath for the mind”

- Sir John Simon

“Bobby Fischer is the greatest Chess genius of all time”

- Alexander Kotov

“If Chess is a science, it\'s a most inexact one. If Chess is an art, it is too exacting to be seen as one. If Chess is a sport, it\'s too esoteric. If Chess is a game, it\'s too demanding to be just a game. If Chess is a mistress, she\'s a demanding one. If Chess is a passion, it\'s a rewarding one. If Chess is life, it\'s a sad one”

- N.N.

“A good sacrifice is one that is not necessarily sound but leaves your opponent dazed and confused”

- Rudolph Spielmann

“Chess is ruthless: you\'ve got to be prepared to kill people”

- Nigel Short

“Some sacrifices are sound; the rest are mine”

- Mikhail Tal

“One doesn\'t have to play well, it\'s enough to play better than your opponent”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Everything is in a state of flux, and this includes the world of Chess”

- Mikhail Botvinnik

“Combinations have always been the most intriguing aspect of Chess. The masters look for them, the public applauds them, the critics praise them. It is because combinations are possible that Chess is more than a lifeless mathematical exercise. They are the poetry of the game; they are to Chess what melody is to music. They represent the triumph of mind over matter”

- Reuben Fine

“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”

- Marcel Duchamp

“Chess is life”

- Bobby Fischer

“Chess is played with the mind and not with the hands!”

- Renaud and Kahn

“By the beauty of his games, the clarity of his play, and the brilliance of his ideas, Fischer made himself an artist of the same stature as Brahms, Rembrandt, and Shakespeare”

- David Levy

“Chess is as much a mystery as women”

- Purdy

“Winning isn\'t everything... but losing is nothing”

- Mednis

“Without error there can be no brilliancy”

- Emanuel Lasker

“When you don\'t know what to play, wait for an idea to come into your opponent\'s mind. You may be sure that idea will be wrong”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Even the laziest King flees wildly in the face of a double check!”

- Aaron Nimzowitsch

“Chess is in its essence a game, in its form an art, and in its execution a science”

- Baron Tassilo

“The mistakes are there, waiting to be made”

- Savielly Tartakower

“Weak points or holes in the opponent\'s position must be occupied by pieces not Pawns”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Modern Chess is too much concerned with things like Pawn structure. Forget it, Checkmate ends the game”

- Nigel Short

“Chess is the art of analysis”

- Mikhail Botvinnik

“In order to improve your game, you must study the endgame before everything else, for whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middle game and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame”

- Jose Raul Capablanca

“Nothing excites jaded Grandmasters more than a theoretical novelty”

- Dominic Lawson

“You have to have the fighting spirit. You have to force moves and take chances”

- Bobby Fischer

“Look at Garry Kasparov. After he loses, invariably he wins the next game. He just kills the next guy. That\'s something that we have to learn to be able to do”

- Maurice Ashley

“We must make sure that Chess will not be like a dead language, very interesting, but for a very small group”

- Sytze Faber

“It is no time to be playing Chess when the house is on fire”

- N.N., Italian Proverb

“I\'m not a materialistic person, in that, I don\'t suffer the lack or loss of money. The absence of worldly goods I don\'t look back on. For Chess is a way I can be as materialistic as I want without having to sell my soul”

- Jamie Walter Adams

“All that matters on the Chessboard is good moves”

- Bobby Fischer

“You can only get good at Chess if you love the game”

- Bobby Fischer

“There must have been a time when men were demigods, or they could not have invented Chess”

- Gustav Schenk

“Fischer is under obligation to nobody”

- Joseph Platz

“Live, lose, and learn, by observing your opponent how to win”

- Amber Steenbock

“I am the best player in the world and I am here to prove it”

- Bobby Fischer

“Robert Fischer is a law unto himself”

- Larry Evans

“We don\'t really know how the game was invented, though there are suspicions. As soon as we discover the culprits, we\'ll let you know”

- Bruce Pandolfini

“Spassky will not be psyched out by Fischer”

- Mike Goodall

“A man that will take back a move at Chess will pick a pocket”

- Richard Fenton

“When I have White, I win because I am white; When I have Black, I win because I am Bogolyubov”

- Bogolyubov

“Chess is a fighting game which is purely intellectual and includes chance”

- Richard Reti

“In Chess, as it is played by masters, chance is practically eliminated”

- Emanuel Lasker

“It is always better to sacrifice your opponent\'s men”

- Savielly Tartakower

“Strategy requires thought, tactics require observation”

- Max Euwe

“The laws of Chess do not permit a free choice: you have to move whether you like it or not”

- Emanuel Lasker

“Blessed be the memory of him who gave the world this immortal game. ”

- A. G. Gardiner

“Life is like a game of Chess, changing with each move”

- N.N,, Chinese Proverb

“The game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities of the mind are to be acquired and strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is a kind of Chess”

- Benjamin Franklin

“All my games are real”

- Bobby Fischer

“Chess is really ninety nine percent calculation”

- Soltis

“Castle early and often”

- Rob Sillars

“Of Chess it has been said that life is not long enough for it, but that is the fault of life, not Chess”

- William Ewart Napier

“My problem with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible”

- Dave Barry

“One cannot play chess if one becomes aware of the pieces as living souls and of the fact that the Whites and the Blacks have more in common with each other than with the players. Suddenly one loses all interest in who will be champion”

- Anatol Rapoport

“

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time

- George Bernard Shaw

“Chess is the most elaborate waste of human intelligence outside of an advertising agency”

- Raymond Chandler

“Having good strategies in playing chess is often a good indication of being focused in life”

- Martin Dansky

“People are governed with the head; kindness of heart is little use in chess”

- Chamfort

“I failed to make the chess team because of my height”

- Woody Allen

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art -- and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position”

- Marcel Duchamp

“The best chess-player in Christendom may be little more than the best player of chess; but proficiency in whist implies capacity for success in all these more important undertakings where mind struggles with mind”

- Edgar Allan Poe

“I feel as if I were a piece in a game of chess, when my opponent says of it: That piece cannot be moved”

- Soren Kierkegaard

“What have we achieved in mowing down mountain ranges, harnessing the energy of mighty rivers, or moving whole populations about like chess pieces, if we ourselves remain the same restless, miserable, frustrated creatures we were before? To call such activity progress is utter delusion. We may succeed in altering the face of the earth until it is unrecognizable even to the Creator, but if we are unaffected wherein lies the meaning?”

- Henry Miller

“A great chess-player is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it. No act terminating in itself constitutes greatness. This will apply to all displays of power or trials of skill, which are confined to the momentary, individual effort, and construct no permanent image or trophy of themselves without them”

- William Hazlitt

“I am like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess”

- Dennis Miller

“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 is really a good idea and whether there are other, better ideas”

- Stanley Kubrick

“Most gods throw dice, but Fate plays chess, and you do not find out til too late that he has been playing with two queens all along”

- Terry Pratchett

“Firstly, there is no such person as Death. Second, Death is this tall guy with a bone face, like a skeletal monk, with a scythe and an hourglass and a big white horse and a penchant for playing chess with Scandinavians. Third, he does not exist either”

- Neil Gaiman

“In [chess], where the pieces have different and \"bizarre\" motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound”

- Edgar Allan Poe

“Poets do not go mad, but chess players do”

- G. K. Chesterton

“The higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess”

- Edgar Allan Poe

“A single inattention may lose a chess game, whereas a single successful approach to a problem, among many which have been relegated to the wastebasket, will make a mathematician\'s reputation”

- Norbert Wiener

“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

“The human element, the human flaw and the human nobility - those are the reasons that chess matches are won or lost”

- Viktor Korchnoi

“It is a gross overstatement, but in chess, it can be said I play against my opponent over the board and against myself on the clock”

- Viktor Korchnoi

“Every time I win a tournament I have to think that there is something wrong with modern chess”

- Viktor Korchnoi

“I had lunch with a chess champion the other day. I knew he was a chess champion because it took him 20 minutes to pass the salt”

- Eric Sykes

“Chess is not 99% tactics, it is just that tactics takes up 99% of your time”

- Dan Heisman, The Improving Annotator

“If you want to lose a miniature, then here are three helpful tips. First of all, it is a big help if you are Black: losing with White in under 20 moves requires a special talent which few possess. Secondly, choose a provocative opening, for example an opening in which you try to realise strategic ambitions, but at the cost of backward development and delayed castling. Thirdly, if something goes slightly wrong, do not reconcile yourself to defending a bad position - seek a tactical solution instead! Do not worry about the fact that tactics are bound to favour the better developed side; just go ahead anyway. Follow this advice and at least you will get home early”

- John Nunn

“I really find all this [opening preparation by club players] quite amazing, not least because the games concerned are almost invariably decided much later on and often by rather unsophisticated means”

- Nigel Davies, KingPin No.28 Spring 1998

“In my country, at that time, being a champion of chess was like being a King. At that time I was a King - and when you are King you feel a lot of responsibility, but there is nobody there to help you”

- Boris Spassky

“We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors do not like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre
”

- Boris Spassky

“

I love all positions. Give me a difficult positional game, I will play it. Give me a bad position, I will defend it. Openings, endgames, complicated positions, dull draws, I love them and I will do my very best. But totally won positions, I cannot stand them

- Hein Donner, Clubblad DD, 1950

“The process of rating players can be compared to the measurement of the position of a cork bobbing up and down on the surface of agitated water with a yard stick tied to a rope and which is swaying in the wind”

- Arpad Elo, Chess Life, 1962

“The fact that the 7 hours time control allows us to play a great deep game is not of great importance for mass-media”

- Alexei Shirov, Open letter to the FIDE, 2000

“In blitz, the knight is stronger than the bishop”

- Vlastimil Hort

“Dazzling combinations are for the many, shifting wood is for the few”

- Georg Kieninger, Deutsche Schachhefte, 1950

“I already came upon the world as a extraordinary human being; to my parents\' great horror, I was equipped with a clubfoot which, however, did not hamper my rapid progress”

- Siegbert Tarrasch, Dreihundert Schachpartien, 1894

“Oh! this opponent, this collaborator against his will, whose notion of Beauty always differs from yours and whose means (strength, imagination, technique) are often too limited to help you effectively! What torment, to have your thinking and your phantasy tied down by another person!”

- Alexander Alekhine, (Foreword to) Mes Problèmes et études d\'échecs, Fred. Lazard, 1929

“The profuse phallic symbolism of chess provides some fantasy gratification of the homosexual wish, particularly the desire for mutual masturbation”

- Reuben Fine, The Psychology of the Chess Player, 1956

“My life has been determined by the move e2-e1N”

- Johan Barendregt, Interview with Max Pam, 1972

“When you absolutely don\'t know what to do anymore, it is time to panic”

- John van der Wiel

“I have not given any drawn or lost games, because I thought them inadequate to the purpose of the book”

- Jose Capablanca, My Chess Career, 1920

“And the rigidity of the material with which we have to compose, is a more formidable opponent than Lasker or Capablanca. Because these lifeless opponents do not have any moments of human weakness!”

- Henri Weenink, Het Schaakprobleem, 1921

“Checkers is for tramps”

- Paul Morphy

“Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929”

- Mikhail Botvinnik, Interview by Genna Sosonko, 1989

“They asked me what year it was, what month it was, etc. I easily answered these stupid questions”

- Bobby Fischer, I was Tortured in the Pasadena Jailhouse!, 1982

“Poor Capablanca! Thou wert a brilliant technician, but no philosopher. Thou wert not capable of believing that in chess, another style could be victorious than the absolutely correct one”

- Max Euwe, Tijdschrift van den Nederlandschen Schaakbond, 1942

“Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity”

- Vladimir Nabokov, Poems and Problems, 1969

“You know, comrade Pachman, I do not enjoy being a Minister, I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela”

- Che Guevara, According to Ludek Pachman, Checkmate in Prague, 1975

“Now I have the pawn and the compensation”

- Roman Dzindzichashvili

“The middle game, where the struggle is really fought, will take a variable number of moves, and will be named so until the certainty of mate for one of the two players is ninety percent”

- Madame Flash, Je gagne aux éches, 1963

“Two passed pawns on the sixth beat everything, up to a royal flush”

- Ian Rogers

“And his six pawns were scattered like the ships of the Armada that should have conquered England; the Lord blew, and they were all isolated”

- Hans Kmoch, Groningen 1946 tournament book

“Nowadays, when you are not a grandmaster at 14, you can forget about it”

- Viswanathan Anand

“For me, this personality, notwithstanding his fundamentally optimistic attitude, had a tragic note. 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, even when he was occupied by philosophical and humanitarian questions”

- Albert Einstein, Foreword to Hannak\'s biography of Emanuel Lasker

“In a very strongly played match between Mrs. Brookman and C. Deen, White was able to place a fork, whereby Black lost his one rook, and shed a piece of exchange. This loss put Black under heavy pressure and tried to achieve a better position in the defense, but White continued strongly with her attacking play and was able to finish the game surprisingly by mate, to her advantage, 1-0”

- N.N., Hoogeveense Courant, 5 april 1991

“It is one of the insights of modern players, and especially of the best ones, that one has to play the position itself, not some abstract idea of the position”

- John Watson, Secrets of Modern Chess Strategy, 1998

“The only thing chess players have in common is chess”

- Lodewijk Prins, Interview by Max Pam, 1972

“The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess”

- H.G. Wells, Certain Personal Matters, 1898

“A sensation, hidden in the depths of my emotional memory, was suddenly revived: what if... What if for me The Variation is not dead? If The Variation is alive?!”

- Lev Polugayevsky, Grandmaster Preparation, 1981

“Chess is thriving. There are ever less round robin tournaments and ever more World Champions”

- Robert Hübner, Schach, december 2000

“Genius. It is a word. What does it really mean? If I win I am a genius. If I do not, I am not”

- Bobby Fischer

“Half the variations which are calculated in a tournament game turn out to be completely superfluous. Unfortunately, no one knows in advance which half”

- Jan Timman

“I add status to any tournament I attend”

- Bobby Fischer

“I object to being called a chess genius, because I consider myself to be an all around genius, who just happens to play chess, which is rather different. A piece of garbage like Kasparov might be called a chess genius, but he is like an idiot savant, outside of chess he knows nothing”

- Bobby Fischer

“It began to feel as though you were playing against chess itself”

- Walter Shipman, On playing against Fischer

“It is difficult to play against Einsteins theory”

- Mikhail Tal, On his first loss to Fischer

“It is, sadly, altogether too easy, in fact effortless, to find legions of people, not just chess players, who have every reason to say, and have (and please believe me that I do not do this out of spite or rancor) from the earliest days of Fischers career to this very day, he has been labeled: brash, arrogant, selfish, self-centered, boorish, loutish, cruel, unreasonable, difficult, impossible, inconsiderate, ungrateful, petty, petulant, sulking, crass, insensitive, irrational, contentious, argumentative, aggravating, insulting, crazy, wicked, and mad. I would tend to agree”

- Paul Kollar

“Methodical thinking is of more use in chess than inspiration”

- Purdy

“My opponents make good moves too. Sometimes I do not take these things into consideration”

- Bobby Fischer

“Of course a great player like that has no weak spots. What a player like that does have are absolutely strong spots, so you surely do not want him to utilize his strengths, because then your chances decrease to zero. It is not surprising - chess being as complicated as it is - that Fischer had the greatest problems with positions, which were unclear in an unthematic way. When in effect everything just depended on accurate calculation. In those kinds of positions, he is still better than me of course, but the difference is not that great anymore, because it is just extremely difficult for both of us. The chance that he will make an error increases, whereas in a thematic or technical position he will just play perfectly from beginning to end and your chances of surviving are zero”

- Edmar Mednis

“Play out a boring game to the end and funny things can happen; Fischer knew it”

- Hans Ree

“The chess heroes nowadays should not forget that it was owing to Fischer that they are living today in four- and five- star hotels, getting appearance fees, etc.”

- Lev Khariton

“The huge egos of great chess players are legendary. Psychologists have been amazed by their vanity, have studied it, and anecdotes concerning it are abundant. But never before has there been such a prima donna as Bobby. Already he has managed to alienate and offend almost everybody in the chess world. That includes officials, patrons, writers, almost everybody and anybody who might be in a position to help him in his career”

- Al Horowitz

“There are more adventures on a chessboard than on all the seas of the world”

- Pierre Mac Orlan

“When in doubt -- play chess”

- Tevis

“Let the perfectionist play postal”

- Yasser Seirawan

“The older I grow, the more I value Pawns”

- Paul Keres

“If drink is the curse of the working classes and work is the curse of the drinking classes then chess is the curse of the thinking classes ”

- J. Ross

“There just is not enough televised chess”

- David Letterman

“When the going gets tactical, the computers get going”

- Hyatt

“An isolated Pawn spreads gloom all over the chessboard”

- Tartakover

“The first principle of attack .. Do not let the opponent develop!”

- Rueben Fine

“Mikhail Gromov, the outstanding Soviet pilot, wrote that if one wants to become a good pilot one must learn the art of self-control. These words may apply equally to chess and to every chessplayer”

- V.B. Malkin

“Nimzovitch became then for me more or less the author of the only book which could help me get away from these Euwe books, which, I admit, are very good for the ordinary club player. But once you have reached a certain strength you get the impression that everything that Euwe writes is a lie”

- Bent Larsen

“In some places words have been replaced by symbols which, like amulets from a witchs bag, have the power to consume the living spirit of chess. The notorious !! can never approximate the human emotions which accompany an excellent move or a great idea.  ...Oh, those exclamation points! How they erode the innocent soul of the amateur, removing all hope of allowing him to examine another players ideas critically!”

- Tigran Petrosian

“When your house is on fire, you cannot be bothered with the neighbors. Or, as we say in Chess, if your King is under attack you do not worry about losing a Pawn on the Queenside”

- Gary Kasparov

“I had a toothache during the first game. In the second game I had a headache. In the third game it was an attack of rheumatism. In the fourth game, I wasn\'t feeling well. And in the fifth game? Well, must one have to win every game?”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“A good player is always lucky”

- Jose Raul Capablanca

“Those who say they understand Chess, understand nothing”

- Robert Hubner

“Chess was Capablancas mother tongue”

- Richard Reti

“Chess is not like life... it has rules!”

- Mark Pasternak

“Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make people happy”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“A bad day of Chess is better than any good day at work”

- N.N.

“We cannot resist the fascination of sacrifice, since a passion for sacrifices is part of a Chessplayers nature”

- Rudolf Spielman

“Adequate compensation for a sacrifice is having a sound combination leading to a winning position; adequate compensation for a blunder is having your opponent snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”

- Bruce A. Moon

“Daring ideas are like Chess men moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game”

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“After a bad opening, there is hope for the middle game. After a bad middle game, there is hope for the endgame. But once you are in the endgame, the moment of truth has arrived”

- Edmar Mednis

“If you are not afraid of Spassky, then I have removed the element of money”

- Jim Slater

“I have never in my life played the French Defence, which is the dullest of all openings”

- Wilhelm Steinitz

“Chess is imagination”

- David Bronstein

“Life is a kind of Chess, with struggle, competition, good and ill events”

- Benjamin Franklin

“In Fischers hands, a slight theoretical advantage is as good a being a Queen ahead”

- Isaac Kashdan

“I played Chess with him and would have beaten him sometimes only he always took back his last move, and ran the game out differently”

- Mark Twain

“In Chess, just as in life, todays bliss may be tomorrows poison”

- Assaic

“Many have become Chess Masters, no one has become the Master of Chess”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“The battle for the ultimate truth will never be won. And that is why Chess is so fascinating”

- Hans Kmoch

“A thorough understanding of the typical mating continuations makes the most complicated sacrificial combinations leading up to them not only not difficult, but almost a matter of course”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“The King is a fighting piece. Use it!”

- Wilhelm Steinitz

“For surely of all the drugs in the world, Chess must be the most permanently pleasurable”

- Assiac

“A sacrifice is best refuted by accepting it”

- Wilhelm Steinitz

“One of these modest little moves may be more embarrassing to your opponent than the biggest threat”

- Siegbert Tarrasch

“Most commentaries in chess magazines and books are superficial and sometimes just awful. Once a certain experienced master explained to me how he worked. You put two fingers to the page with text on it and see that there are only moves under them - in other words, it is time to make a comment. You write something like \"The Ruy Lopez always leads to a tense, complicated struggle\" - and your fee goes up by a rouble”

- Dvoretsky

“After giving a student the basic mating patterns and strategies you must begin giving them advanced concepts. At first these ideas will not make sense, many players will have a vague idea of what you are talking about but nothing more. Even a fragmented understanding of these concepts will prove useful though, and eventually they will improve as these lessons are assimilated by repetition and example”

- Jeremy Silman, The Amateur’s Mind

“What distinguishes a Grandmaster from a master? Chess-lovers often ask questions like that. To many people it seems that Grandmasters simply calculate variations a little deeper. Or that they know their opening theory slightly better. But in fact the real difference is something else. You can pick out two essential qualities in which those with higher titles are superior to others: the ability to sense the critical moment in a game, and a finer understanding of various positional problems”

- Yusupov, Opening Preparation

“It is often supposed that, apart from their \'extraordinary powers of memory\', expert players have phenomenal powers of calculation. The beginner believes that experts can calculate dozens of moves ahead and he will lose to them only because he cannot calculate ahead so far. Yet this is utter nonsense. From my own experience I can say that grandmasters do not do an inordinate amount of calculating. Tests (notably de Groot\'s experiments) supports me in this claim. If anything, grandmasters often consider fewer alternatives; they tend not to look at as many possible moves as weaker players do. And so, perversely, chess skill often seems to reflect the ability to avoid calculations. It is, in truth, not clear that chess is a game of calculation. Of course there are times when intense calculation is called for, and often the master is better at dealing with these situations than the amateur. No wonder, he has had more practise than the amateur, but all the same his innate calculating ability need not be any greater. Most of the time it is something quite different that is required in chess, something more akin to \'understanding\' or \'insight\'”

- David Norwood, Chess and Education

“A lot of the difference between an IM and GM is a seriousness to the game. The GM is willing to go through all this. He is willing to put up with anything. This shows his dedication. One other thing is the GMs superiority in tactics. For example Christiansen can find tactics in any position. If you are a GM you should be able to overpower the IM tactically. The GM will often blow out the IM in this area”

- Nick de Firmian

“Combinative vision manifests itself at an early age, and children are quick to notice and execute combinations which chance to turn up. Preparing combinations, however, is more difficult for them”

- Zak

“One of the main aims has been to highlight the differences in appraoch between a Grandmaster and a weaker player, and to try and narrow the gap. To some extent this comes down to technical matters - more accurate analysis, superior opening knowledge, better endgame technique and so forth; but in other respects the difference goes deeper and many readers will find that they need to rethink much of their basic attitude to the game. One example of this would be the tremendous emphasis which is placed on the dynamic use of the pieces, if necessary at the expense of the pawn structure, or even of material. This is no mere question of style; it is a characteristic of the games of all the great players”

- Peter Griffiths