'If you wait for luck to turn up, life becomes very boring.'

Mikhail Tal

'Without the element of enjoyment, it is not worth trying to excel at anything.'

Magnus Carlsen

'If you don’t win, it’s not a great tragedy – the worst that happens is that you lose a game.'

Bobby Fischer

'When you see a good move, look for a better one.'

Emanuel Lasker

'There are two types of sacrifices: correct ones and mine.'

Mikhail Tal

'Excelling at chess has long been considered a symbol of more general intelligence. That is an incorrect assumption in my view, as pleasant as it might be.'

Garry Kasparov

'I am more strongly confirmed than ever in the belief that the time devoted to chess is literally frittered away.'

Paul Morphy

'A good player is always lucky.'

José Raúl Capablanca

'The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move.'

David Bronstein

'Well, I think, in large part, when I first began playing chess at seven years old, I was quite bad at it. I lost a lot of games when I first started.'

Hikaru Nakamura

'A win is a win, which is about that particular moment.'

Viswanathan Anand

'A sound plan makes us all heroes, the absence of a plan, idiots.'

Alexander Kotov