The Perseus Project: The classics in Greek, Latin & English

https://scaife.perseus.org/reader/u...

A link to a page with downloads from the Venetus A, the oldest complete manuscript of the Iliad, courtesy of Harvard:

http://www.homermultitext.org/manus...

From Google Books, a link to Tarrasch's book on the 1908 world championship. I've translated his notes on the game pages.

http://books.google.com/books?id=0C...

Lasker's book on St. Petersburg 1909

http://www.google.com/books?id=o3eC...

Tarrasch's <Dreihundert Schachpartien>, which covers his career from the beginning through his match with Chigorin in 1893

https://books.google.com/books?id=9...

The passion for playing chess is one of the most unaccountable in the world. It slaps the theory of natural selection in the face. It is the most absorbing of occupations. The least satisfying of desires. A nameless excrescence upon life. It annihilates a man. You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.

-- H.G. Wells

Chess-play is a good and witty exercise of the mind for some kind of men, and fit for such melancholy, Rhasis holds, as are idle, and have extravagant impertinent thoughts, or troubled with cares, nothing better to distract their mind, and alter their meditations; invented (some say) by the general of an army in famine, to keep soldiers from mutiny: but if it proceed from overmuch study, in such case it may do more harm than good; it is a game too troublesome for some men's brains, too full of anxiety, all out as bad as study; besides it is a testy choleric game, and very offensive to him that loseth the mate. William the Conquerer, in his younger years, playing at chess with the Prince of France (Dauphine was not annexed to that crown in those days) losing a mate, knocked the chess-board about his pate, which was a cause afterwards of much enmity between them.

--Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

Just because many great chess players were obnoxious jerks, doesn't mean that if you're an obnoxious jerk you're a great chess player.

--AgentRgent

You are also a machine, as are Anand, Carlsen, Kasparov, and Fischer. You and the others are just inferior machines. Your idea of beautiful chess is simply faulty chess that is not caught in its faults.

--vsaluki

Alas, before the post mortem the gods have placed the game.

--Phony Benoni

A chess engine is a great antidote to human optimism.

--johnlspouge

[Y]ou have not been mean to me. Being mean to me is accepting my sacrifices and then taking me to a lost ending.