Quotes about Chess

'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.'

She glanced rather shyly at the real Queen as she said this, but her companion only smiled pleasantly, and said, 'That's easily managed.  You can be the White Queen's Pawn, if you like, as Lily's too young to play; and you're in the Second Square to began with:  when you get to the Eighth Square you'll be a Queen - '

All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.' 

Describing one competitive advantage of IBM's Deep Blue chess computer. It has no fear.

In many cases, mathematics is an escape from reality. The mathematician finds his own monastic niche and happiness in pursuits that are disconnected from external affairs. Some practice it as if using a drug. Chess sometimes plays a similar role. In their unhappiness over the events of this world, some immerse themselves in a kind of self-sufficiency in mathematics. (Some have engaged in it for this reason alone.)

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

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

All we have gained then by our unbelief Is a life of doubt diversified by faith, For one of faith diversified by doubt: We called the chess-board white-we call it black.

That she won the game startled me cold. The way she won, the pattern of her thought on the chessboard, charmed me warm again and then some.

Life after Fifty Everything hurts and what doesn't hurt doesn't work. The gleam in your eyes is from the sun hitting your bifocals. You feel like the night before and you haven't been anywhere. You get winded playing chess. Your children begin to look middle aged. You begin to outlive enthusiasm. Your mind makes contracts your body can't meet. You know all the answers, but nobody asks you the questions. You look forward to a dull evening. Your favorite part of the newspaper is 25 Years Ago Today. You sit in a rocking chair and can't get it going. Your knees buckle and your belt won't. You reget all those mistakes resisting temptation. Dialing long distance wears you out. Your back goes out more than you do. A fortune teller offers to read your face. You burn the midnight oil after 9:00 pm. You sink your teeth into a steak and they stay there. You get your exercise acting as a pallbearer for your friends who exercise. You have too much room in the house & not enough room in the medicine cabinet. The best part of my day is over when the alarm goes off.

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

The Advantage is that mathematics is a field in which one's blunders tend to show very clearly and can be corrected or erased with a stroke of the pencil. It is a field which has often been compared with chess, but differs from the latter in that it is only one's best moments that count and not one's worst. 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.

The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem. . . .

The chess board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just, and patient. But also we know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Reductio ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician's finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess play: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.

Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.

For all their wealth of content, for all the sum of history and social institution invested in them, music, mathematics, and chess are resplendently useless (applied mathematics is a higher plumbing, a kind of music for the police band). They are metaphysically trivial, irresponsible. They refuse to relate outward, to take reality for arbiter. This is the source of their witchery.

In life, as in chess, forethought wins.

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.

The pleasure of risk is in the control needed to ride it with assurance so that what appears dangerous to the outsider is, to the participant, simply a matter of intelligence, skill, intuition, coordination - in a word, experience. Climbing, in particular, is a paradoxically intellectual pastime, but with this difference: you have to think with your body. Every move has to be worked out in terms of effort, balance and consequences. It is like playing chess with your body. If I make a mistake, the consequences are immediate, obvious, embarrassing and possibly painful. For a brief period, I am directly responsible for my actions. In that beautiful, silent world of the mountains, it seems to me worth a little risk.