George Stenger’s Reviews > Everyone's First Chess Workbook: Fundamental Tactics and Checkmates for Improvers – 738 Practical Exercises > Status Update

You may enjoy my favorite quotes on chess:

Dear Mr. Shaibel, there’s a chess tournament here with a first prize of a hundred dollars, and a second prize of fifty dollars. There are other prizes too. It costs five dollars to enter, and I don’t have that. If you will send me the money, I will pay you back ten dollars if I win any prize at all. - Beth Harmon

Chess isn’t always competitive. Chess can also be beautiful. It was the board I noticed first. It’s an entire world of just 64 squares. I feel safe in it. I can control it. I can dominate it. And it’s predictable, so if I get hurt, I only have myself to blame. - Beth Harmon, Queens Gambit

“Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to manuever you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop." - C.S. Lewis

“[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. ” - George Bernard Shaw, The Irrational Knot

“I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art - and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position. (On giving up art to play chess)” - Marcel Duchamp

“I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let's make this interesting'. So we stopped playing chess.” - Matt Kirshen

“The queen was my favorite chess piece. Unlike the women I knew in real life, she was powerful. Her job was to defend her husband at all costs, because while he was weak and practically defenseless—only allowed to move one square at a time—she was the strongest player on the board, hindered by no restrictions at all.” - Rachel Vincent, Stray

“Avoid the crowd. Do your own thinking independently. Be the chess player, not the chess piece.” - Ralph Charell

“But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad's coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit?” ― Stefan Zweig, Chess Story

Bishops move diagonally. That's why they often turn up where the kings don't expect them to be. - Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

“You know what the game of golf is, don't you? It's basketball for people who can't jump and chess for people who can't think.” - Tom Robbins, B Is for Beer