51 Inspiring Chess Quotes

Chess, often regarded as the game of kings, combines strategy, intellect, and foresight. Throughout history, this timeless game has enchanted and challenged minds across the globe, inspiring countless players and enthusiasts. Within the chess world, many have shared their reflections, offering insights that extend beyond the 64 squares of the board. These quotes capture the essence, wisdom, and passion inherent in the game. Join us as we explore a curated collection of the top 51 inspiring chess quotes, providing motivation and deepening appreciation for this remarkable pursuit. Whether you're a grandmaster or a casual player, these words of wisdom are sure to resonate and inspire your next move.

1. “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.” - Marcel Duchamp

2. “When the Pawn Hits the Conflicts He Thinks Like a King What He Knows Throws the Blows When He Goes to the Fight and He'll Win the Whole Thing 'Fore He Enters the Ring There's No Body to Batter When Your Mind Is Your Might So When You Go Solo, You Hold Your Own Hand and Remember That Depth Is the Greatest of Heights and If You Know Where You Stand, Then You Know Where to Land and If You Fall It Won't Matter, Cuz You'll Know That You're Right” - Fiona Apple

3. “I prefer to make my annotations 'hot on the heels', as it were, when the fortunes of battle, the worries, hopes and disappointments are still sufficiently fresh in my mind. Much as I would like to, I cannot say this about these few games which will be given below. In fact, if the annotator should begin to use phrases of the type: 'in reply to...I had worked out the following variation...', the reader will rightly say 'Grandmaster, you are showing off', since the 'oldest' of these games is now more than 25 years old, and even the 'newest' more than 20. Therefore, I would ask you not to regard the following 'stylised' annotations too severely. ” - Mikhail Tal

4. “When you see a good move, look for a better one” - Emanuel Lasker

5. “Life is more than just chess.Though king dies, life goes on.” - Toba Beta

6. “[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

7. “Chess lied to herself every day; it was just something she did, like taking her pills or making sure she had a pen in her bag. Little lies, mostly. Insignificant. Of course there were big ones there, too, like telling herself that she was more than just a junkie who got lucky enough to possess a talent not everyone had. That she was alone by choice and that she was not terrified of other people because they couldn’t be trusted, because they carried filth in their minds and pain in their hands and they would smear both all over her given half the chance.” - Stacia Kane

8. “A great chessplayer is not a great man, for he leaves the world as he found it.” - William Hazlitt

9. “What is a weak pawn? A pawn that is exposed to attack and also difficult to defend is a weak pawn. There are several varieties: isolated, doubled, too advanced, retarded.” - Samuel Reshevsky

10. “He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.” - George Orwell

11. “and a most curious country it was. There were a number of tiny little brooks running straight across it from side to side, and the ground between was divided up into squares by a number of little green hedges, that reached from brook to brook.I declare it's marked out just like a large chessboard!' Alice said at last. 'There ought to be some men moving about somewhere--and so there are!' she added in a tone of delight, and her heart began to beat quick with excitement as she went on. '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!” - Lewis Carroll

12. “How dreadful...to be caught up in a game and have no idea of the rules.” - Caroline Stevermer

13. “IF her life had taught her anything, it was that you never really knew what people had going on beneath the surface. People were shit. The only difference between them and animals was people felt the need to hide it.” - Stacia Kane

14. “Terrible thought she was brave. She remembered it now, heard his voice in her head as if he stood next to her. "They scared. Not you, though." Terrible thought she was brave, and if he - a man whose name was Terrible, a man whose path people scrambled to get out of - thought so, it must be true. She could do this, she would do this.” - Stacia Kane

15. “With magic almost anything was possible; all objects had energy, and energy could be manipulated.” - Stacia Kane

16. “Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.” - Arturo Pérez-Reverte

17. “People, she was discovering, were like cockroaches: If you allowed one in, more were sure to follow.” - Stacia Kane

18. “How the hell did people do this, this emotion-and-forgiveness thing? How did they stand these feelings? She could barely handle it and she had lovely, necessary, reason-for-living drugs to smooth over the rough spots. How did people do this shit sober?” - Stacia Kane

19. “Her sigh felt dragged from the depths of her soul. Great. Working for Bump again.” - Stacia Kane

20. “Most Debunkers spent their money on actual things, rather than just buying anything they could swallow, smoke or snort. Unlike Chess.” - Stacia Kane

21. “You ain’t know nothing,” a man scoffed. “How I’m supposed to trust some junkie Churchwitch-”The words sliced through her like razor-sharp fangs. Her face flooded with shame, so hot she imagined it steamed in the icy air. At least it wasn’t difficult to identify the speaker. All she had to do was look for the man with Terrible’s fist locked around his neck.“Ain’t think I hear you right,” Terrible said in a calm, quiet voice. “Wanna louden up?” The man shook his head His eyes bulged. He looked like a bug, with his hands clenching into tiny useless fists. “You sure? You got else to say, you best say it now, instead of later. Now we got us watchers. Later might not be true, dig?” The man dug.” - Stacia Kane

22. “She wasn’t considering it, not really….but he did have a point. It was her job. Save the cold, and the disgusting suggestion that she might actually turn a trick or two wasn’t a half bad idea. That was the problem with Bump. Despite the fact that he was practically a textbook villain – she expected him to grow a mustache to twirl any day- his ideas made sense.” - Stacia Kane

23. “An apocryphal story - the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" - tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.” - Lemony Snicket

24. “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

25. “Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.” - Brian Christian

26. “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 games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.” - Brian Christian

27. “We are men who find chess fascinating. Did you expect our lives to be secretly interesting?” - noah boyd

28. “I'm a chess piece. A pawn,' she said. 'I can be sacrificed, but I cannot be captured. To be captured would be the end of the game.” - Paolo Bacigalupi

29. “Aye. Freaky iffen you ask me. But guessing that what Terrible like, aye. What he deserve sneaking off into the bathroom with some rigmutton cunt, leaving me on my alones in the bar, and other men talking to me and saying I got me a date there and he fucking some whore while everyone outside the bathroom hearing them.” - Stacia Kane

30. “So aint you think just causen you in this car now means any damn thing. It aint. He pretending it do, he lying and saying it do, but it aint. Pretend that other dame just he friend, so he say, but aint like it true.Some churchbitch she is too. Leastaways that what Amy telling me. Amy say she met her once and she aint shit.” - Stacia Kane

31. “She’d fucked him over hardcore. She’d betrayed him and she’d lied to him, and she knew that as far as he was concerned she’d led him on and used him as well, had consorted with people who wanted to see him dead and given them information to help them make him so. Most of all, she’d hurt him. And if the pain in her chest was anything close to what he’d felt, she was more than willing to admit he deserved to get his own back. Was willing to do more than admit it; was willing to take it, in the hopes he’d eventually decide she’d been punished enough and they could maybe move on.” - Stacia Kane

32. “I’m not into danger, either.” “Aw, Chess. You so into it you ain’t climb out with a rope. Why else you do your job, live down here, buy from Bump?” “It’s just—I mean—I just do, is all.” Her cheeks burned. She shouldn’t have let him come in here. She should have just sent him home and let him wash his stupid shirt himself. “No shame in it. Some of us needs an edge on things make us feel right, else we ain’t like feeling at all, aye?” - Stacia Kane

33. “It was her problem, and she'd deal with it. Because dealing with personal problems was so fucking high on her list of skills.” - Stacia Kane

34. “His hands on the sides of her face, on her neck, holding her there. "Chessie...shit, Chessie, I love you so bad." His teeth on her throat, biting hard, his lips soothing the spot. "So fucking much, so...so bad.” - Stacia Kane

35. “If God wanted humans to play chess, he would have made us black or white.” - Zenna Henderson

36. “In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ...It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.” - Stefan Zweig

37. “Then again, she had-through a bizarre combination of skill, dumb luck and incredible misfortune-managed to build up a file any Debunker would envy.” - Stacia Kane

38. “I believe that, not only in chess, but in life in general, people place too much stock in ratings – they pay attention to which TV shows have the highest ratings, how many friends they have on Facebook, and it’s funny. The best shows often have low ratings and it is impossible to have thousands of real friends.” - Boris Gelfand

39. “I don't simply create probabilities, I guide them.” - Lionel Suggs

40. “Love is like a game of chess. You're white. He's black. You wait for him to make a move, while staring into his handsome, melting-you-on-the-inside eyes, then realize what a dummy he is to not tell you straight out to go first. The beginning is the crush stage. You begin to realize how much you want to defeat him, or make him fall in love with you. By the time you get to the heat of the game, you both moved and are hopefully dating. If you haven't forfeit then because you don't want to be cheated on, you make another move- head on shoulder, hand holding, etc. Black makes another move-he gives you his jacket on a freezing night. By the endgame, he either realizes how stupid he was to play with you and forfeits, or he realizes how smart you are and lets you defeat him (and love you). By the time you win, you're married to him. A happily ever after game of chess.” - Amrita Ramanathan

41. “There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones, and mine.” - Mikhail Tal

42. “I want to be an aggressive player;One who always find joy in every move.” - Kenneth de Guzman

43. “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

44. “I ain't...Don't know how to say it up right. Never--Fuck, Chess. Thought you was dead once before, you recall? Never felt so bad in my life, not ever. Then on the other day, thought you was gone and just....I can't do it, bein without you.” - Stacia Kane

45. “Tis action moves the world....[in] the game of chess, mind that: ye cannot leave your men to stand unmoving on the board and hope to win. A soldier must first step upon the battlefield if does mean to cross it.” - Susanna Kearsley

46. “The reason I like the game chess is because each move has countless repercussions, but you're in charge of them. And it's your ability to see into the future and the effects of the decisions you've made that males you either a good or not a good chess player. It's not luck.” - Bono

47. “Ecco, sai giocare a scacchi. Adesso devi diventare un giocatore. Ci vorrà un po' di più.” - Guenassia Jean-Michel

48. “Yeah, I lied and I shouldn’t have and it was lousy of me and I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you, I never wanted that, and I wish so bad I could take it all back, okay? But we both know which one of us is lying now and it’s not me. So you call me when you want to actually talk to me and not just yell at me or tell me what a shitty person I am. I already…yeah, I already know that, okay?” - Stacia Kane

49. “Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.” - Benjamin Franklin

50. “I'm playing chess while everyone else is playing checkers, that's why I always lose” - Josh Stern

51. “She has gathered that the man in the grey suit whom her father called Alexander also has a student, and there will be some sort of game. "Like chess?" she asks once. "No," her father says. "Not like chess.” - Erin Morgenstern