A Quote by Emanuel Lasker

By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight.

Emanuel Lasker

Quote Topics

Ardent Art Been Characteristic Chess Delights Elevated Fight Human Human Nature Mostly Nature Neither Principal Science Seems Some

Quote Author

Emanuel Lasker
German - Chess Player
December 24, 1868 - January 11, 1941

Chess is neither a science nor an art. It is what human nature most delights in--a fight.

Emanuel Lasker

A sport, a struggle for results and a fight for prizes. I think that the discussion about "chess is science or chess is art" is already inappropriate. The purpose of modern chess is to reach a result.

Alexander Morozevich

The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.'

Michael Crichton

Botvinnik's right! When he says such things, then he's right. Usually, I prefer not to study chess but to play it. For me chess is more an art than a science. It's been said that Alekhine and I played similar chess, except that he studied more. Yes, perhaps, but I have to say that he played, too.

Mikhail Tal

Gradually, ... the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire.

Bertrand Russell

The spiritual life is part of the human essence. It is a defining characteristic of human nature, without which human nature is not fully human.

Abraham Maslow

A game of chess holds many secrets. Fortunately! That is why we cannot clearly state whether chess is science, art, or a sport.

Garry Kasparov

What is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it's a science. It's neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.

Ben Kingsley

My study of chess was accompanied by a strong attraction to music, and it was probably thanks to this that from childhood I became accustomed to thinking of chess as an art, for all the science and sport involved in it.

Vasily Smyslov

There seems to be some perverse human characteristic that likes to make easy things difficult.

Warren Buffett

Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! Every fool, from king to policeman, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

Emma Goldman

Nature supplies the game of chess with its implements; science with its system; art with its aesthetic arrangement of its problems; and God endows it with its blessed power of making people happy.

Peter Weiss

Chess is a unique cognitive nexus, a place where art and science come together in the human mind and are then refined and improved by experience.

Garry Kasparov

When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.

Ashot Nadanian

Understanding human nature must be the basis of any real improvement in human life. Science has done wonders in mastering the laws of the physical world, but our own nature is much less understood, as yet, than the nature of stars and electrons. When science learns to understand human nature, it will be able to bring a happiness into our lives which machines and the physical sciences have failed to create.

Bertrand Russell

In the Soviets' view, chess was not merely an art or a science or even a sport; it was what it had been invented to simulate: war.