Chess in The Arts and Literature/history

Famous quotes containing the words chess, arts, literature and/or history:

    The sailor is frankness, the landsman is finesse. Life is not a game with the sailor, demanding the long head—no intricate game of chess where few moves are made in straight-forwardness and ends are attained by indirection, an oblique, tedious, barren game hardly worth that poor candle burnt out in playing it.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)

    Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
    —P.D. (Phyllis Dorothy)

    If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.
    J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)