'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

'Chess is a fairy tale of 1,001 blunders.'

Savielly Tartakower

'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

'A good player is always lucky.'

José Raúl Capablanca

'Planning anything is hopeless.'

Mikhail Tal

'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

'Win with grace, lose with dignity!'

Susan Polgar

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

Alexander Kotov