Chess first of all teaches you to be objective.

I think that for the highest achievements nowadays... need to have the stable as a rock scientific base. And also need to own modesty.

Chess is not only knowledge and logic.

Oh! this opponent, this collaborator against your will, whose notion of beauty always differs from yours and whose means are often too limited for active assistance to your intentions!

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.

I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity.

We should not forget, no matter how we quantify it: 'Freedom is not free.' It is a painful lesson, but one from which we have learned in the past and one we should never forget.

I have sympathy for young people, for their growing pains, but I balk when these growing pains are pushed into the foreground, when you make these young people the only vehicles of life's wisdom.