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

Mikhail Tal

'Chess is thirty to forty percent psychology. You don’t have this when you play a computer. I can’t confuse it.'

Judit Polgar

'There's so many lessons I get from chess, it's incredible, but I think the biggest thing for me has always been is that losing is learning.'

Maurice Ashley

'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

'Even a poor plan is better than no plan at all.'

Mikhail Chigorin

'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

'Win with grace, lose with dignity!'

Susan Polgar

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

Alexander Kotov