What is Chess?

Chess is ludicrously difficult …Stephen Fry

Chess is an earnest exercise of the mind …Thomas Cogan

Chess is one long regret …Stephen Lealock

Chess is a sad waste of brains …Sir Walter Scott

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever …George Bernard Shaw

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency …Raymond Chandler

Chess is not a game, but a disease …Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman

Chess is an innocent and intellectual amusement after the mind has been engrossed with too much care or study …Hassan of Basra

Chess, like love, is infectious at any age …Salo Flohr

Chess is a beautiful mistress …Bent Larsen

(Chess puzzles are like masturbation but) playing chess is like making love …George Steiner

Chess is as much a mystery as women …Cecil Purdy

Chess is a jealous lover …John Healy

Chess is vanity …Alexander Alekhine

Chess is one of the sins of pride …John Bromyard

Chess is thinking about what chess is …David Bronstein

Chess is life …Bobby Fischer

Chess is like life …Boris Spassky

Chess is indeed like life …Stephen Fry

Chess is my life, but my life isn’t just chess …Anatoly Karpov

Chess is my job and fills the main part of my life …Alexei Shirov

Chess is most certainly not my life …Tony Miles

Chess is life in miniature. Chess is struggle, chess is battles …Garry Kasparov

Chess is a challenge, a battle …Terry Marsh

Chess is a fight …Emanuel Lasker

Chess is a blood sport …Jon Speelman

Chess is ruthless: you’ve got to be prepared to kill people …Nigel Short

Chess is a fighting game which is purely intellectual and excludes chance …Richard Réti

Chess is a game of courteous aggression …Julian Barnes

Chess is a game of war …Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing

Chess is a confrontation …Simon Barnes

Chess is a gladiatorial contest …Raymond Keene

Chess is a test of wills …Paul Keres

Chess is a cure for diarrhea and erysipelas …A mistranslation of Herodotus

Chess is a cure for headaches …John Maynard Keynes

Chess is first of all art …Mikhail Tal

Chess is the art of battle for the victorious battle of art …Savielly Tartakower

Chess is the art of analysis …Mikhail Botvinnik

Chess is the art which expresses the beauty of logic …Mikhail Botvinnik

Chess is the art of human reason …Gustavus Selenius

Chess is not only knowledge and logic …Alexander Alekhine

Chess is an art appearing in the form of a game …Soviet Encyclopedia

Chess is everything – art, science, and sport …Anatoly Karpov

Chess is just a game …Lajos Portisch

Chess is a combination of ten games …Miguel Najdorf

Chess is only a game, and not to be classed with science or the arts …Emanuel Lasker

Chess is a game of skill and not of genius …William Hazlitt

Chess is undoubtedly the same sort of art as painting or sculpture …José Raul Capablanca

Chess is a game in its essence, an art in its form, and a science in its execution …Baron Tassilo von Heydebrand und der Lasa

Chess is an almost perfect combination of art, investigative science, knowledge, and inspiration …Raymond Keene

Chess is too difficult to be a game, and not serious enough to be a science or an art …Napoleon

Chess is not just a game; it bears an international significance …Jeremy Hanley MP

Chess is not a science …Henri Poincaré

Chess is beautiful enough to waste your life for …Hans Ree

Chess is the most exciting game in the world …Irving Chernev

Chess is the most interesting game that exists …Lothar Schmid

Chess is the most intelligent thing in the universe …David Norwood

Chess is the game which reflects most honour on human wit …Voltaire

Chess is one of the noblest inventions of the human mind …Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad

Chess is eminently and emphatically the philosopher’s game …Paul Morphy

Chess is the most beautiful and reasonable of all games …Mme de Sévigné

Chess is the fairest of all games …Isaac Bashevis Singer

Chess is a fine entertainment …Leo Tolstoy

Chess is an exercise full of delights …Arthur Saul

Chess is not merely an idle amusement: life is a kind of chess …Ben Franklin

Chess is a game of intellect and character over the open board; chess is a game of life …Frank Marshall

Chess is a game for strong people with strong character …Mikhail Botvinnik

Chess is a big time sport …Tony Miles

Chess is a sport. A violent sport …Marcel Duchamp

Chess is imagination …David Bronstein

Chess is work …Walter Browne

Chess is a cold bath for the mind …Andrew Bonar Law

Chess is an exercise full of delights …Arthur Saul

Chess is a hothouse where the fruits of character can ripen more fully than in life …Edward Morgan Forster

Chess is imagination …David Bronstein

There is no other game so esteemed, so profound and so venerable as chess; in the realm of play it stands alone in dignity …Ely Culbertson

For surely, of all the drugs in the world, chess must be the most permanently pleasurable …Assiac

There are two classes of people; those who are content to yield to circumstance, and who play whist; those who aim to control circumstances and who play chess …Mortimer Collins

In answering the question, “Which is the greater game, Chess or Checkers,” I must, in all frankness, favor Chess …Newell W. Banks Blindfold Checker Champion of the World

The poorest chess player is more to be envied than the most favored servant of the Golden Calf; for the latter grovels all his life long in the mire of materialism; while the former dwells high aloft, in the bright realms of imagination and poetry …Weiss

Nature supplies the game of chess with its implements; science with its system; art with its aesthetic arrangement of its problems; and God endows it with its blessed power of making people happy …Weiss

Could we look into the head of a chess player, we should see there a whole world of feelings, images, ideas, emotion and passion …Alfred Binet

The game of chess possesses a literature which in contents probably exceeds that of all other games combined …H. J. R. Murray

The real lives of dazzlingly brilliant chess geniuses are sometimes hopelessly dull …Reuben Fine

A person that will take back a move at chess will pick a pocket …Fenton

First restrain, next blockade, lastly destroy! …Aron Nimzowitsch

It is not a move, even the best move, that you must seek, but a realizable plan …Eugene Znosko-Borovsky

The tactician knows what to do when there is something to do; whereas the strategian knows what to do when there is nothing to do …Gerald Abrahams

“It’s a great game of chess that’s being played all over the world.” …Lewis Carroll (Through The Looking Glass)

The blunders are all there on the board, waiting to be made …Savielly Tartakower

Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness …Siegbert Tarrasch

Chess is the touchstone of the intellect …Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Chess is both profoundly trivial and trivially profound: a universe simultaneously closed and unbounded …George Steiner

Chess is not for timid souls …Wilhelm Steinitz

Chess is a place where I’m going to enjoy myself …John Cage

Chess is a powerful weapon of intellectual culture …Slogan for 1924 All-Union Congress of Soviet Union

Chess is the struggle against error …Johannes Zukertort

Chess is a game of bad moves …Andy Soltis

Chess is a fairy tale of 1001 blunders …Savielly Tartakower

Chess is the sublimated fite …par excellence Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing

Chess is a mime of the family romance and of the Oedipal drama …Alexander Cockburn

Chess is a contest between two men in which there is considerable ego involvement …Reuben Fine

Chess is a pursuit crammed with tension and emotion …Anthony Saidy and Norman Lessing

Chess is the movement of pieces eating each other …Marcel Duchamp

Chess is a dromenon …Frank Vigor Morley

Chess is an international language …Edward Lasker

Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe …Indian Proverb

Chess is a validation of stupidity …Totalle Le Vezfleaux

Chess is fun …Luke McShane

Chess is me …Salvador Dali

Chess is perfect …Jace D. Albao

Chess is a game of skill for two played with figures or men of different kinds which are moved on a chequered board …Chambers 20th Century Dictionary