120 quotes found
"I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away. It is, to be sure, a most exhilarating sport, but it is only a sport; and it is not to be wondered at that such as have been passionately addicted to the charming pastime should one day ask themselves whether sober reason does not advise its utter dereliction."
"Chess never has been and never can be aught but a recreation. It should not be indulged in to the detriment of other and more serious avocations."
"It [chess] is not only the most delightful and scientific, but the most moral of amusements."
"It [chess] is eminently and emphatically the philosopher's game."
"Let the chessboard supercede the card table, and a great improvement will be visible in the morals of the community."
"Anderssen voiced it well when asked why he did not play as brilliantly as usual in his game with Morphy, when he replied: "Morphy will not let me.""
"Paul Morphy was the greatest chess player that ever lived. Every student of the game, who has delved into the stories of the past, realizes that no one ever was so far superior to the players of his time, or ever defeated his opponents with such ease, and no one ever offered knight odds to the men who considered themselves his equal."
"So still was he, that but for the searching intellect which glittered in his full dark eye, you might have taken him for a carven image as he pondered his moves. His bearing was mild and that of a refined gentleman, and he dealt the most crushing blows on his adversary with an almost womanly ease and grace."
"...Morphy was stronger than anyone he played with, including Anderssen"
"Morphy's principal strength does not rest upon his power of combination but in his position play and his general style....Beginning with la Bourdonnais to the present, and including Lasker, we find that the greatest stylist has been Morphy. Whence the reason, although it might not be the only one, why he is generally considered the greatest of all."
""...Morphy, the master of all phases of the game, stronger than any of his opponents, even the strongest of them..." ~ Alexander Alekhine, in Shakmatny Vestnik, January 15, 1914"
"We also remember the brilliant flight of the American super-genius Paul Morphy, who in a couple of years (1857-59) conquered both the New and the Old Worlds. He revealed a thunderous blend of pragmatism, aggression and accurate calculation to the world -- qualities that enabled America to accomplish a powerful spurt in the second half of the 19th century."
"What was the secret of Morphy's invincibility? I think it was a combination of a unique natural talent and brilliant erudition. His play was the next, more mature stage in the development of chess. Morphy had a well-developed 'feeling for position', and therefore he can be confidently regarded as the 'first swallow' - the prototype of the strong 20th century grandmaster."
"After the passage of a century, Morphy still remains the most glamorous figure that has ever appeared in the chess world."
"Genius is a starry word; but if there ever was a chess player to whom that attribute applied, it was Paul Morphy."
"It has been truly said that Morphy was at once the Caesar and the Napoleon of chess. He revolutionized chess. He brought life and dash and beauty into the game at a time when an age of dullness was about to set in and he did this at a stroke. Then he quit forever. Only two years from the beginning to the end. The negotiations for some modern matches have taken that long!"
"In order to improve your game you must study the endgame before anything else; for, whereas the endings can be studied and mastered by themselves, the middlegame and the opening must be studied in relation to the endgame."
"I am always reminded of the case of a noted American journalist, an excellent fellow, well educated, and, at the time I have in mind, chess champion of the state in which he resided. My friend devoted a great deal of time and energy to the study of the openings. Whenever I passed through his city he always came to the station for me and put me up at his house. We would have frequent conversations during which he would ask me about this or that variation; to his great surprise I would almost always answer, "I don't know it" Then he would say: "What will you do when somebody plays it against you?" And I would reply, "Ninety percent of the book variations have no great value, because either they contain mistakes or they are based on fallacious assumptions; just forget about the openings and spend all that time on the endings. In the long run you will get much better results that way.""
"Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy."
"Chess is a form of intellectual productiveness, therein lies, its peculiar charm. Intellectual productiveness is one of the greatest joys -if not the greatest one- of human existence. It is not everyone who can write a play, or build a bridge, or even make a good joke. But in chess everyone can, everyone must, be intellectually productive and so can share in this select delight. I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of chess, just as I would pity for the man who has no knowledge of love. Chess, like love, like music, has the power to make men happy."
"The rooks belong behind passed pawns, behind their own in order to support their advance, behind the enemy's in order to impede their advance."
"Mistrust is the most necessary characteristic of the Chess player."
"To acquire a reputation of being a dashing player at the cost of losing a game."
"He who fears an isolated Queen's Pawn should give up Chess."
"Before the endgame, the Gods have placed the middle game."
"Many have become Chess Masters, no one has become the Master of Chess."
"In tournaments it is not enough to be a connoisseur of chess; one must also play well."
"Up to this point White has been following well-known analysis, but now he makes a fatal error - he begins to use his own head."
"The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it."
"From Anderssen I learned the art of making combinations; from Tarrasch I learned how advantageously to avoid making them."
"Don't fiddle while Byrne roams!"
"The greatest compliment one can pay a master is to compare him with Capablanca."
"I achieved more than I could dream of in chess and in chess composing."
"Going through Yochanan's studies I got the impression that he is like a music composer who creates many lovely songs with charming melodies, but rarely composes operas."
"When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport."
"Coaching secrets? I don’t think I got any. The main "secret" – love for chess."
"Chess is not Mathematics, where ten is always more than one; in chess the King with a pawn can beat opponent's King with all pieces if they are placed badly."
"The center of the chessboard is a magnet, which pulls to itself all the pieces. Therefore the most beautiful and amazing moves, for me, are those with which a piece, counteracting the gravitational force of the center, suddenly fly to the edge of the board."
"Learn from each one of your defeats; your losses must be as close to you as your victories."
"Even Ashot's mistakes contain elements of creativity."
"When he is inspired, he is capable of producing magic."
"After having been present at his amusing lessons just once, I will always feel envious of his students."
"I could keep talking about Ashot as chess player, composer, theoretician, or a trainer; however I would rather write about him as a person. If I were asked, which of my close friends is the most honest and kind, I would not hesitate to name Ashot."
"Ashot is a born trainer."
"My first teachers were street players, guys who would hustle you, get in your head, break you down mentally before they did it over the board."
"Our minds are all different and I believe cultivating a keen introspective sensitivity is absolutely essential in discovering our potential."
"I think we are at our best when we work with our natural eruptions, use them as fuel for the fire."
"I love the play between the conscious and unconscious minds in the creative moment, and for me chess and the martial arts are both about developing a rich working relationship with your intuition."
"Josh writes almost from a position of wonder, a person who admires thunderstorms and violent seas, he ponders the life lessons through which he has progressed, appraises, incorporates and evolves methods to deal with harsh reality and learn to use it to one’s own benefit."
"Of all the various ways which the imagination has distorted truth, there is none which has worked so much harm as an exaggerated respect for past ages. This reverence for antiquity is repugnant to every maxim of reason, and is merely the indulgence of a poetic sentiment in favour of the remote and unknown."
"Our knowledge is composed not of facts, but of the relations which facts and ideas bear to themselves and to each other; and real knowledge consists not in an acquaintance with facts, which only makes a pedant, but in the use of facts, which makes a philosopher."
"And, notwithstanding a few exceptions, we do undoubtedly find that the most truly eminent men have had not only their affections, but also their intellect, greatly influenced by women. I will go even farther; and I will venture to say that those who have not undergone that influence betray a something incomplete and mutilated. We detect, even in their genius, a certain frigidity of tone; and we look in vain for that burning fire, that gushing and spontaneous nature with which our ideas of genius are indissolubly associated. Therefore, it is, that those who are most anxious that the boundaries of knowledge should be enlarged, ought to be most eager that the influence of women should be increased, in order that every resource of the human mind may be at once and quickly brought into play."
"When the interval between the intellectual classes and the practical classes is too great, the former will possess no influence, the latter will reap no benefits."
"Maxwell probably first encountered Quetelet in an article by... John Herschel... (...familiar with Quetelet as a fellow astronomer). Later, in 1857, Maxwell read a newly published book by... Henry Thomas Buckle. Buckle, himself clearly influenced by Quetelet, believed that science could discover the "laws of the human mind" and that human actions are a part of "one vast system of universal order." ...Though Maxwell found Buckle's book "bumptious," he recognized it as a source of original ideas, and the statistical reasoning Buckle applied to society seemed just the thing... needed to deal with molecular motion."
"Henry Thomas Buckle expired at on the last day of May in the present year. ...There has passed away from the world one of the heroes, if not one of the martyrs of learning. ...[T]he announcement of his death has cast a shadow upon many who knew him only as an indefatigable wooer of knowledge, a bold explorer in the regions of historical and social science."
"Having gained a prize for mathematics, and being desired by his parents to name his own additional reward, he claimed the privilege of being removed from school, and receiving thenceforth his education at home. ...Mr. Buckle ...was either dissatisfied with his instructors, or resolved to be the sole architect of his own mind. His tutors were dismissed; and he, a boy of fourteen years, set forth without a pilot upon the sea of knowledge."
"In about four years his multifarious studies began to converge towards one focus—the intellectual progress and civilization of mankind. ...[I]ts fulfilment became the object of his life."
"[H]is book [History of Civilization]... must always be regarded as an extraordinary proof of a mind at once sanguine and persevering."
"Mr. Buckle was happily released by his father's liberality; and by his death, in 1840, he came into possession of a handsome competence, of wealth, indeed, to one whose sole expenditure was upon books."
"[I]n the year 1857—that is to say, about twenty years after the idea of a History of Human Progress in England first dawned upon him—committed the result of his steady ten-hours-a-day labour to the press, and followed the first volume with a second, published in 1861."
"Mr. Buckle had assailed more than one order of mankind: the political economist and the lawyer have, perhaps, long since ceased to resent, but the Scotch are not likely to forget, nor are the clergy prone to forgive, such an antagonist."
"With many readers the author has doubtless passed for a hard man, dealing with men's actions and thoughts as with so many links in the chain of causation, with the aspects of life as the mere products or phenomena of Fate or Necessity."
"His body he from earliest youth had treated as a slave, his mind as a sovereign: for the one no sacrifice as too great; for the other, no privations were thought excessive."
"He discerned, or at least he imagined, that a great void in the history of human progress awaited the filling-up: and however opinions may vary upon his fitness for his self-imposed task there can be no question of the ardour and sincerity he brought to its performance."
"His recluse life entailed upon his writings some serious disadvantages. If from his 'study' he did not 'rail at human kind,' he formed, from his long commerce with books alone, harsh and one-sided opinions of classes, that earlier and more free intermixtures with them would have softened or corrected."
"Of the clergy he saw only one, and that not the more favourable side. He regarded them writers or preachers alone, and not as active and humanizing elements in society."
"He is right in ascribing to dogmatic theology dark, cruel, ignorant and groundless theories, alike at variance with a divine Author and dishonourable to human nature."
"He is wrong when he represents the orator in the pulpit, or the scholar in the closet, as hard, bigoted, and severe as his doctrines."
"The extracts from the Scotch divines that fill so large a space in the notes of Mr. Buckle's second volume, are atrocious enough to prove that Torquemada and St. Dominic were not better disposed to rack and burn their fellow men than the Gillespies, the Guthries, the Halyburtons, and the Rutherfords..."
"His heart was not closed or narrowed to the great interests of his kind. He may have weighed classes of them in an ill-adjusted balance, but to the progress of men in whatsoever delivers the human race from bondage to idols of the market, of the temple, or the tribe, he was never indifferent."
"In the cause of what he believed to be civilization, his energy was unflagging, his sympathy intense."
"Of the plan and execution of his History we are not in a condition to speak; we have portions only of the Introduction to it. Much that in the Prolegomena is incomplete or inaccurate, crude or rash, would probably, after maturer experience and enlarged insight, have been supplied or corrected in the historical sequel."
"[C]onceding for the moment that the term civilization is sufficiently intelligible, if not very precise, Mr. Buckle's manner of handling the subject is somewhat capricious and irregular."
"The second volume is... little more than an episode of the first; with a few inconsiderable changes, it might have stood alone as a record of the effects of perverted religion in Spain or Scotland."
"The discrepancies and inconveniences attendant on the vagueness of the term civilization might... have been avoided had the work been entitled a 'History of the Aspects of Society in England.' There would then have been no previous question about the import of a title sufficiently elastic to include the era when Britons painted their bodies with woad and the era when they assumed trousers and paletots."
"He perceived that history in its best forms is but an imperfect record of the thoughts and deeds of men. ...It was Mr. Buckle's object to collect and place these phenomena upon a scientific basis, to discover the law of their growth, progress, and decline, to show why on some soils they withered, why on others they bore fruit an hundred-fold."
"How far he failed or how far he succeeded in his attempt to construct a science of history, we do not pretend to determine: we are merely pointing to the high and arduous object he set before himself."
"[H]e sinned the sin of excessive generalization. It may be true that in certain cycles or shorter periods of time the sums of human acts are strangely alike. It may be true also that statistics afford to history one of its most sure and instructive auxiliaries. But it is no less certain that such tabular records are not only in their infancy, but as regards former times, either do not exist, or are most scanty and precarious aids to truth. At the best, also, they represent a few only of the elements of social life, and probably centuries of exact observation must elapse before they can be permitted to supersede the other grounds, moral, intellectual, and religious, on which history hitherto as been constructed."
"In his anxiety, if not indeed his determination, to find a comprehensive idea, Mr. Buckle often strains, if he does not misrepresent facts. He is too prone to assume that men under similar circumstances will be similar themselves, and leaves scarcely a margin for the disturbances of passion, custom, or accident."
"His voice was unmusical and his manner rather defiant. But one could not be five minutes in a room with him without being aware that a talker unusually informed with book knowledge was present."
"The doctrines of Auguste Comte are not palatable on this side of the Channel; and although Mr. Buckle accepted M. Comte's creed with reservation, he is indebted to it for some of his theories."
"[S]ure were Mr. Buckle's strictures on the and to draw down upon him the wrath of North Britain."
"Hero-worshippers... have no reason to be pleased with his speculations, since he resolves the course of history into cycles and a system, and ascribes but little permanent influence to individual soldiers, statesmen, or saints."
"Mr. Buckle fights against ...[the ecclesiastical body] with the whole armoury of distrust and defiance. ...[S]ome of his charges were ill-considered and unfounded; but these, the faults of seclusion and inexperience, do not, in the main, affect his assertion, that no class of men is fit to be entrusted with irresponsible power, and of all classes, the clergy least."
"[W]e are not likely again to see so much learning and ability employed upon themes which remunerate the student with neither present profit nor honour. Be what they may the faults of the book, the merits of the author are sterling. He sought knowledge for its own sake: for knowledge he gave up his youth, his talents, his fortune, and possibly his life."
"s did not deter, nor shadows intimidate him; whatever, in his judgment... retarded... the progress of men, he denounced; whatever, in his opinion, was likely to accelerate or secure it, he advocated."
"If we cannot inscribe it on the roll of historians or philosophers of the highest order, yet the name of HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE merits a high place on the list of earnest seekers for Truth."
"With Comte, the people cannot move intelligently out of the leading-strings of the government; with Buckle, the sole function of a government is to express as best it may the sum of the national will. Comte... has insisted on the subjection of man to his antecedents; but he has neglected the connexion between man and natural laws."
"The recklessness of the assertion that Buckle owed everything to Comte, is obvious to whoever will consider what each has achieved in the science of history. Indeed their similarity is only incidental. ...[T]heir subjects overlapped each other: Comte in seeking for a rational form of government; and Buckle in showing how every movement of mankind is subject to law."
"There are many points upon which Comte and Buckle are one; perhaps they are even more than those in which they differ: but while the former are mostly subsidiary, the latter are mostly fundamental. Comte's laws of civilization are evolved as a necessary deduction... Buckle... proves the predictability of human actions by statistics. ...Buckle ...discovers the laws of civilization first inductively, and then ...reverses the process and proves them deductively. ...Every step Buckle takes is strictly reasoned, and his proof is more positive and verified than any Comte chooses ...Buckle's work stands on the same basis as any other scientific work, while Comte with all his positive claim ...[has] no inductive complement to his deductive proof."
"Buckle's chief merit is that he first made a science of history by connecting it with political economy and statistics, and has shown how every advance is intellectual from the people, and never in the opposite direction. Indeed, one of the truths he most insists upon, is, that it is better to make a harmful law with the concurrence of the people, than to make a good one which they do not like."
"For the Englishman there are only two available ways to deal with the genius and the “great man”: either democratically, in the style of Buckle, or religiously, in the style of Carlyle."
"SEND + MORE = MONEY"
"One does not have to have experience raising children through school, dealing with family tragedies, and so forth, to be able to find three numbers whose fourth powers add up to another one."
"One of the things about math and chess is that we’re better at doing it than philosophizing about it."
"Indeed, Elkies admits he can improvise fugues, "at least on reasonable themes in a slow enough tempo.""
"Among students and faculty alike, any mention of his name is usually accompanied by a quick glance around, a devious smile, and hunched-over, half-whispered anecdotes about the man."
"Noam is unlike anyone we've ever had."
"I'm happy that I'm a Catholic, Jesus is my hope and he is everything to me."
"I am happy to have won the championship. Many people have improved, the last time I played here there were not many woman candidate masters, today we have about three kids with those titles and I was really impressed with the way they played."
"If you don’t fight you can’t get it."
"I like chess because it involves planning."
"I never believed I’d become an inspiration to other people."
"As I played, I only target registering victories, It never crossed my mind I would land the Fide Master title. Upon being announced, I felt honored."
"I played each of my games like it was my last because my opponents were very skilled. I was very serious. This is now motivation for me to train harder as I target a Woman Fide Master title at the Olympiad."
"I want to win every opponent lined against me and this was one driving factor that explains how I won it."
"As a competitive athlete I know full well the highs and lows of winning and losing. Athletes experience sport participation on different levels."
"Sport participation is a lifelong pursuit for many people, especially with people becoming more active and appreciating the value of being fit and healthy."
"believe good mental preparation starts with our youth and that it is important for them to learn about mental skills."
"Just without all the frills and complicated academic jargon."
"In this research report I introduced Stabilis Treatment Centre by exploring and providing an overview of their existing programmes."
"I have stated the research problem and the subsequent research question and goals."
"A literature review is included where information with regards to drug abuse, exercise psychology and the use of chess in various contexts is provided."
"The final push to write my book came as I needed to find a way to offer sport psychology to children. My goal is to make sport psychology accessible to as many children as possible."
"I learned how to play chess by watching. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I had made the most important decision of my life, but then it became clear that something had happened, and I went back to school; my mom had to make a sacrifice for me, and I returned."
"I was a very curious kid, so I asked what this was, and he said it was a chess set. I’d never seen one before, but I was fascinated by the way the pieces were carved, so I told him to teach me because I wanted to learn how to play because I would see him just sit down and talk to himself all right and it would say crazy stuff like well if you play this game you’ll be very intelligent, you’ll be very smart, and I told him to please teach me, and he said no I was too young and he didn’t teach me."
"I had challenges with teaching the boys who had never been to school, but believe me, they learnt at an incredible pace. What would take a master a year to learn was learnt by them in a month."
"Today’s youth know very well where and how to use the strength in their arms and their knowledge."
"Victory belongs to the team, but responsibility is personal."