Mikhail Botvinnik Quotes

Chess is the art which expresses the science of logic.

Chess mastery essentially consists of analyzing Chess positions accurately

Chess cannot be taught. Chess can only be learned.

If Tal sacrifices a piece, take it. If Petrosian sacrifices a piece, don't take it.

If you are weak in the endgame, you must spend more time analysing studies; in your training games you must aim at transposing to endgames, which will help you to acquire the requisite experience.

Chess is the art of analysis.

When my opponent's clock is going I discuss general considerations in an internal dialogue with myself. When my own clock is going I analyse conctrete variations.

I claim that nothing else is so effective in encouraging the growth of chess strength as such independent analysis, both of the games of the great players and your own.

Chess, like any creative activity, can exist only through the combined efforts of those who have creative talent, and those who have the ability to organize their creative work

In short, we can see Karpov as an exploiter of other people’s ideas. His ability to use these ideas is not at issue, but he himself is about as fertile as a woman who has been sterilized is.

If you are going to make your mark among masters, you have to work far harder and more intensively, or, to put it more exactly, the work is far more complex than that needed to gain the title of Master.

It is peculiar but a fact nevertheless, that the gamblers in chess have enthusiastic followers.

I ... have two vocations: chess and engineering. If I played chess only, I believe that my success would not have been significantly greater. I can play chess well only when I have fully convalesced from chess and when the 'hunger for chess' once more awakens within me.

I only think well when my mind is calm.

Yes, I have played a blitz game once. It was on a train, in 1929.

Capablanca's phenomenal move-searching algorithm in those early years, when he possessed a wonderful ability for calculating variations very rapidly, made him invincible.

With opposite coloured bishops the attacking side has in effect an extra piece in the shape of his bishop.

It is a well known fact that almost all the outstanding chess-players have been first-class analysts.

Every great master will find it useful to have his own theory on the openings, which only he himself knows, a theory which is closely linked with plans for the middle game.

The boy (then a 12 year old boy named Anatoly Karpov)doesn't have a clue about Chess, and there's no future at all for him in this profession

You have to accustom yourself to practical study at home, you have to devote time to studies, to the history of chess, the development of chess theory, of chess culture.

Chess is a part of culture and if a culture is declining then Chess too will decline

If Tal would learn to program himself properly, then it would become quite impossible to play against him.

Suddenly it was obvious to me in my analysis I had missed what Fischer had found with the greatest of ease at the board

Everything is in a state of flux, and this includes the world of Chess