quotations about chess
Chess is too troublesome a game for some men's brains; it is too full of anxiety, all but as bad as study; besides it is a testy, choleric game, and very offensive to him that loseth the mate.
ROBERT BURTON
The Anatomy of Melancholy
Time and space in chess are liquid generally, but in the person of the king they achieve perfect equivalence. This above all other reasons seems to me to account for the king's centrality. The queen, for example, is the most powerful major piece because for a given unit of time, the turn or move, it has the broadest choice of destination, the most freedom with respect to space. A pawn, on the other hand, is structurally incapable of occupying more than seven squares in any game. No matter how hard it works, this pawn will never see most parts of the board, not even given infinite time. For the king, however, every unit of time is also one unit of space, and vice versa. The king spends much of the game waiting. Games sometimes end before it has moved.
CYRUS CONSOLE
Romanian Notebook
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
EMO PHILIPS
attributed, The Mammoth Book of Comic Quotes
The pawns are the soul of chess.
FRANÇOIS-ANDRÉ DANICAN PHILIDOR
Analyse du jeu des Échecs
Chess is life.
BOBBY FISCHER
Chess is ruthless: you’ve got to be prepared to kill people.
NIGEL SHORT
London Observer, Aug. 11, 1991
It's always better to sacrifice your opponent's men.
SAVIELLY TARTAKOWER
attributed, Treasure Chess
Chess is a domain in which criticism has not so much influence as in art; for in the domain of chess the results of games decide, ultimately and finally.
RICHARD RETI
Modern Ideas in Chess
Subject to the universal law of change, Chess is happily not yet so perfect as to find progress in decay. It will and must continue to suffer innovations, making for healthy growth and logical consistency, though its fundamental principles and essential theories may never be seriously disturbed.
JAMES MASON
The Principles of Chess in Theory & Practice
A Passed Pawn increases in strength as the number of pieces on the board diminishes.
JOSÉ RAÚL CAPABLANCA
Chess Fundamentals
Count on the game, fancy it a reliable passion. Yet when the sacraments of chess trump human relationships, life can lose depth and richness. The game eclipses a person's real life and relationships, and the pieces on a board become more significant than relationships with family and friends. Some chess zealots find it difficult to manage well in everyday life, or to integrate the world of chess with the world at large.
ROBERT R. DESJARLAIS
Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard
Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?
GEORGE ELIOT
Felix Holt, the Radical
I failed to make the chess team because of my height.
WOODY ALLEN
attributed, Counterplay: An Anthropologist at the Chessboard
Amberley excelled at chess--one mark, Watson, of a scheming mind.
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
"The Adventure of the Retired Colourman"
I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
The Long Goodbye
It was like when you make a move in chess and just as you take your finger off the piece, you see the mistake you've made, and there's this panic because you don't know yet the scale of disaster you've left yourself open to.
KAZUO ISHIGURO
Never Let Me Go
Wherever chess is mentioned in old chronicles or metrical romances, it is as the occasion of some act of violence or bitter feud. The great size of the early chessmen, and the use of metal in the boards, must have rendered them tempting weapons for an angry man--the rooks especially seem to have been often used as Homer's heroes employ some huge stone.
HOWARD STAUNTON
"The Chess-Player's Handbook,", Littell's Living Age, Aug. 18, 1849
Chess is the gymnasium of the mind.
PASCAL
attributed, Essential Chess Quotations
Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.
INDIAN PROVERB
Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The game begins when it gets out of book, and it ends when it goes into book.
BRIAN CHRISTIAN
The Most Human Human