60 Inspiring Chess Quotes

Chess, often referred to as the "game of kings," has captured the imagination of countless individuals for centuries. It's a game of intellect, strategy, and patience that transcends age, culture, and background. Whether you're just starting your journey or you've spent years mastering the 64 squares, there's an undeniable allure in the wisdom shared by chess legends through the ages. In this post, we unveil a curated collection of 60 inspiring chess quotes that offer not just insights into the game, but also lessons that extend far beyond the chessboard. Let these words from grandmasters and enthusiasts alike inspire you to see each move, in chess and in life, through a lens of thoughtfulness and strategy.

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. “The Pin is mightier than the sword” - Fred Reinfeld

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

7. “[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

8. “Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

9. “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

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

11. “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

12. “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

13. “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

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

15. “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

16. “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

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

18. “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

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

20. “But she never thought about the way Terrible looked, at least not that way. He hadn’t been ugly to her for months; he’d gone from just being a face she was familiar with to being a face she loved to look at, a face that made her….happy. Who gave a shit what anyone else saw when they looked at him, when they saw the crooked, many times broken nose, or the scars, or the jutting brow or thick jaw and heavy muttonchops? She knew what she saw, and that was all that mattered. Knew what was behind those hard dark eyes, and wanted it more than anything.” - Stacia Kane

21. “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

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

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

24. “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

25. “When had being an addict gotten so fucking hard? So exhausting? It had been so easy for so long; she had a steady supply, she kept to herself, nobody bothered her. Now she was constantly up to her ears in intrigue and complications, being torn in every direction but her own, all thanks to her need for those pills” - Stacia Kane

26. “Beer bottles, whiskey bottles, brown glass, green. They fell to the lawn and I'd feel serene. Adam was king to my stilted queen.” - Kate Bernheimer

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “Now mayhap you quit givin Terrible the fuckin slurpy-eyes an give Bump the listening, yay? Thinkin you can? Gots some fuckin chattering wants doin, needs you fuckin head on straight up.” - Stacia Kane

39. “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

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

41. “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

42. “Whereas a novice makes moves until he gets checkmated (proof), a Grand Master realizes 20 moves in advance that it’s futile to continue playing (conceptualizing).” - Bill Gaede

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

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

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

48. “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

49. “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

50. “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

51. “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

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

53. “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

54. “Thou mutters, Miss Putnam. Speak up.”Like she couldn’t hear. She’d hear Chess if Chess ran to the other end of the room, covered her mouth with her hands, and whispered “Fuck you,” but she couldn’t hear Chess standing four feet away from her.” - Stacia Kane

55. “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

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

57. “Some guys live in worlds where pawns stay pawns. I'm one move from king.” - Darnell Lamont Walker

58. “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

59. “Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.” - Anatoly Karpov

60. “Sure. Focused. Let's totally ignore any possible other avenues and just tunnel-vision our way along. Maybe we'll get lucky and blunder into a Lamaru hangout, right?” - Stacia Kane