General Chess Inspiration

This will be an ongoing post I'll continually add to as I come across chess quotes and inspiring advice that I like. Some are well-known, some are less popular, and some are from redditors.

"Chess lives from the constant succession of certainty and error."

--Bernd Rosen. My favorite chess quote of all time.

"The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried." 

"None of us are going to be the next Carlsen, so an ego-centred approach won't lead to any sort of true enjoyment. We may get the occasional impressive win and feel good about ourselves (or shall I say, our ego feels good), but we will always face stronger and stronger opponents and spend most of the time suffering. There are Buddhist analogies here. I think the key is to focus on learning. To play a game as a test of your understanding of chess, not an exercise in anxiously trying to play to a level that you have pre-determined you should play at.

Every game is fundamentally a test of hundreds of small decisions, some more important than others, and whoever has the better understanding will make more correct decisions, and win the game. Sometimes we come out on top and sometimes we don't. Then we go back and look at which decisions were right and which were wrong, and how they can be adjusted for future."

 --Redditor /u/tomlit


"Chess is a sea in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe"

"The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, an aimless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man."
lol --H.G. Wells


"Time spent on any challenging chess work is far better than time spent planning the "perfect" chess study schedule."
--John Bartholomew


"The most powerful weapon in Chess is to have the next move."
--David Bronstein

"It's also really important to play. There are some aspects of chess that aren't necessarily knowledge-based or skill-based but can only come through actual playing and practical experience. So if you're someone who's doing a lot of reading and studying and you're solving a lot of puzzles and challenging yourself, you're definitely going to become a stronger player and a very balanced player overall but if you're not playing it's going to be very hard to gauge whether you're actually making progress and whether you're going to utilize what you've been working on."

--Kostya Kavutskiy

"Seeing much, suffering much, and studying much, are the three pillars of learning."

--Benjamin Disraeli (quoted by J. Tisdall at the beginning of Improve Your Chess Now

"Anyway if you ask me, there is one and only one ideal sort of chess training: The one that you are enthusiastic about. If it turns into "work", then - unless you have a hyper concrete goal in mind (prepare a specific opening in 1 hr for a specific opponent, get a title by next year, type thing) - you basically just won't do it, and when/if you start at all, are spending more time on thinking "when am I done" than on "wow cool, chess!" Some people can sit down with 10 random GM games and then spend a day fully in the zone, just trying to learn everything there is to learn about the games, assimilating 10 different openings and their ideas, recognising middlegame patterns and storing them somewhere, going through them in guess-the-move style to improve their own practical play, and using them as endgame lessons on top. Those people will then tell you, full GM game study, best thing ever invented. Other people will sit down with 10 GM games, then go "man i don't even play this opening", skip to the middlegame, go "well  I would play X.. but they played Y. seem equal to me, just different paths. eh. skip to some critical moment, miscalculate somewhere, go eh whatever again, go to the endgame, then laugh and say "yeah I'm totally gonna reach a Bpppp vs RN endgame ever in my life.. ok this is all pointless" and not feel like looking at the 9 other games. That's perfectly fine. If you aren't enthusiastic about analyzing GM game collections, just don't do it. Find something that you actually love about chess, and just do that! Maybe it's not 100% the best path to increasing rating the quickest if you were to be an unfeeling robot or w/e, but 100hrs of enjoyable work will always reap better rewards than 100hrs of slog."

--From IsaVulpes on Lichess4545 General Slack Channel

"On the chessboard, lies and hypocrisy do not survive long. The creative combination lays bare the presumption of a lie; the merciless fact, culminating in the checkmate, contradicts the hypocrite."

--Lasker

"You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods...The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results."

--Lasker

"He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess...the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to standstill or to anarchy."

--Lasker