InspiringQuotes

Anton Chekhov Quotes:

Anton Chekhov quotes

Ocupation: Physician

Life: January 29, 1860 - July 15, 1904

Birthday: January 29

Death: July 15

famous quotes

Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice.

Topics: Knowledge, Technology, Practice, Knowledge Education, Learning Knowledge

Quotation Anton Chekhov Do silly things Foolishness is a great deal more vital Quotes

The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.

Topics: Tasks, Problem, States

Quotation Anton Chekhov Love friendship and respect do not unite people as much Quotes

Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one's dignity.

Topics: People, May, Dignity

Quotation Anton Chekhov People should be beautiful in every way in their faces Quotes

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

Topics: Horse, Lying, Taken, Orange Trees, Sweating

Quotation Anton Chekhov Everything on earth is beautiful everything except what we ourselves Quotes

Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as a common hatred for something.

source: - "The Life and Genius of Anton Chekhov: Letters, Diary, Reminiscences and Biography".

Topics: Friendship, Respect, Hate, Incapability, Equal Respect

Quotation Anton Chekhov There is nothing more awful insulting and depressing than banality Quotes

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

Topics: Life, Success, Morning, Metaphors Of Life, Day To Day Living

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything -- except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity.

source: - Anton Chekhov (2015). “The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov: Novellas, Short Stories, Plays, Letters & Diary: Three Sisters, Seagull , The Shooting Party, Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard, Chameleon, Tripping Tongue, On The Road, Vanka, Ward No. Six, Swedish Match, Nightmare, Bear, Reluctant Hero, Joy…”, p.3226, e-artnow

Topics: Beauty, Beautiful, Thinking, Creating Beauty, Human Dignity

It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don't just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.

Topics: People, Awkward, Needs

For God's sake, have some self-respect and do not run off at the mouth if your brain is out to lunch.

source: - Anton Chekhov (2008). “How to Write Like Chekhov: Advice and Inspiration, Straight from His Own Letters and Work”, p.24, Da Capo Press

Topics: Running, Lunch, Self

Do silly things. Foolishness is a great deal more vital and healthy than our straining and striving after a meaningful life.

Topics: Meaningful, Silly, Healthy, Silly Things

I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.

Topics: Running, Book, Writing

We are accustomed to live in hopes of good weather, a good harvest, a nice love-affair, hopes of becoming rich or getting the office of chief of police, but I've never noticed anyone hoping to get wiser. We say to ourselves: it'll be better under a new tsar, and in two hundred years it'll still be better, and nobody tries to make this good time come tomorrow. On the whole, life gets more and more complex every day and moves on its own sweet will, and people get more and more stupid, and get isolated from life in ever-increasing numbers.

Topics: Sweet, Nice, Stupid, Good Weather

The world is, of course, nothing but our conception of it.

Topics: World, Existentialism, Metaphysics, Conception

Life is given only once, and one wants to live it boldly, with full conscious and beauty.

Topics: Want, Life Is, Conscious

..when one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.

Topics: Real, Mirages, Live By

Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.

Topics: Hypocrisy, States, Psychopathic

Wisdom.... comes not from age, but from education and learning.

Topics: Inspirational, Education, Age

Perhaps the feelings that we experience when we are in love represent a normal state. Being in love shows a person who he should be.

Topics: Love, Feelings, Self Improvement

Man is what he believes.

Topics: Inspirational, Motivational, Believe

We shall find peace. We shall hear angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.

Topics: Peace, Inspiration, Losing A Loved One, Sparkling, Losing Love

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

Topics: Art, Artist, Roles

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Topics: Men, Insight, Shows, Blank Slates

Here I am with you & yet not for a single moment do I forget that there's an unfinished novel waiting for me.

Topics: Waiting, Forget, Moments

Cross out as many adjectives and adverbs as you can. ... It is comprehensible when I write: "The man sat on the grass," because it is clear and does not detain one's attention. On the other hand, it is difficult to figure out and hard on the brain if I write: "The tall, narrow-chested man of medium height and with a red beard sat down on the green grass that had already been trampled down by the pedestrians, sat down silently, looking around timidly and fearfully." The brain can't grasp all that at once, and art must be grasped at once, instantaneously.

Topics: Art, Writing, Men, Adjectives And Adverbs, Tall

Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.

Topics: Canaries, Pious

Let us learn to appreciate there will be times when the trees will be bare, and look forward to the time when we may pick the fruit.

Topics: Appreciation, Nature, Adversity, Learn To Appreciate

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations!

Topics: Character, Psychology, Essentials, Generalization, Center Of Gravity

If ever my life can be of any use to you, come and claim it.

Topics: Use, Claims

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.

Topics: Wall, Gun, Fire

Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.

Topics: Drama, Wife, Mistress, Cheeky, Boisterous

I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.

Topics: Husband, Moon, Sky

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

source: - Anton Chekhov (2015). “The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov: Novellas, Short Stories, Plays, Letters & Diary: Three Sisters, Seagull , The Shooting Party, Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard, Chameleon, Tripping Tongue, On The Road, Vanka, Ward No. Six, Swedish Match, Nightmare, Bear, Reluctant Hero, Joy…”, p.3128, e-artnow

Topics: Inspirational, Life, Illusion

It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.

Topics: Math, Punishment, Coarse, Hardened, Corporal Punishment

These people have learned not from books, but in the fields, in the wood, on the river bank. Their teachers have been the birds themselves, when they sang to them, the sun when it left a glow of crimson behind it at setting, the very trees, and wild herbs.

Topics: Teacher, Book, Rivers, Inspiring Nature, Crimson

Three o'clock in the morning. The soft April night is looking at my windows and caressingly winking at me with its stars. I can't sleep, I am so happy.

Topics: Morning, Stars, Sleep, Winking

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Topics: Nature, Butterfly, Lovely

Do you see that tree? It is dead but it still sways in the wind with the others. I think it would be like that with me. That if I died I would still be part of life in one way or another.

Topics: Thinking, Wind, Tree

He who desires nothing, hopes for nothing, and is afraid of nothing, cannot be an artist.

Topics: Funny, Sarcastic, Artist

Why are we worn out? Why do we, who start out so passionate, brave, noble, believing, become totally bankrupt by the age of thirty or thirty-five? Why is it that one is extinguished by consumption, another puts a bullet in his head, a third seeks oblivion in vodka, cards, a fourth, in order to stifle fear and anguish, cynically tramples underfoot the portrait of his pure, beautiful youth? Why is it that, once fallen, we do not try to rise, and, having lost one thing, we do not seek another? Why?

Topics: Beautiful, Believe, Order, Lost Ones

People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.

source: - 'The Three Sisters' (1901) act 2

Topics: Happiness, Happy, Summer, Summer And Winter, Summer Garden

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

Topics: Wall, Writing, Long

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.

Topics: Cosmetics, Dealer, Entertainers

The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.

Topics: Powerful, Philosophy, Grief, Upper Hand

A fiance is neither this nor that: he's left one shore, but not yet reached the other.

Topics: Umpires, Engagement, Shore, Fiance

There is nothing new in art except talent.

Topics: Art, Genius, Literature, New Talent

The more refined one is, the more unhappy.

Topics: Happiness, Knowledge, Inner Peace, Refining, Refined

The University brings out all abilities, including incapability.

Topics: Literature, Incapability, Ability

No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand... Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.

Topics: Fake People, Psychology, Doe, Charlatans

Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.

Topics: Aptitude, Facts, Spirit

All of life and human relations have become so incomprehensibly complex that, when you think about it, it becomes terrifying and your heart stands still.

Topics: Heart, Thinking, Scary, Human Relations

By poeticizing love, we imagine in those we love virtues that they often do not possess; this then becomes the source of constant mistakes and constant distress.

Topics: Mistake, Imagine, Virtue

When a lot of remedies are suggested for a disease, that means it can't be cured.

Topics: Pain, Mean, Modern Life, Medical Science

A good upbringing means not that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice it when someone else does.

Topics: Mean, Doe, Literature, Good Upbringing

To a chemist, nothing on earth is unclean. A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must know that dungheaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.

Topics: Passion, Writing, Play

Be sure not to discuss your hero's state of mind. Make it clear from his actions.

Topics: Hero, Mind, Action

Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling. There are in store for you many unsuccessful days and whole unsuccessful seasons: there will be great misunderstandings and deep disappointments… you must be prepared for all this, expect it and nevertheless, stubbornly, fanatically follow your own way.

Topics: Art, Disappointment, Acting, Deep Disappointment

The teacher must be an actor, an artist,passionately in love with his work.

Topics: Teacher, Artist, Actors

Your talent sets you apart: if you were a toad or a tarantula, even then, people would respect you, for to talent all things are forgiven.

Topics: People, Toads, Tarantulas

There should be more sincerity and heart in human relations, more silence and simplicity in our interactions. Be rude when you're angry, laugh when something is funny, and answer when you're asked.

Topics: Integrity, Heart, Laughing

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

Topics: Inspiration, Two, Body, Inspiration Love, Pharisaism

To harbor spiteful feelings against ordinary people for not being heroes is possible only for narrow-minded or embittered man.

Topics: Hero, Men, People, Spiteful

Only one who loves can remember so well.

Topics: Remember, Wells

And only now, when he was gray-haired, had he fallen in love properly, thoroughly, for the first time in his life.

Topics: Firsts, Gray, First Time

Try to be original in your play and as clever as possible; but don't be afraid to show yourself foolish; we must have freedom of thinking, and only he is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Topics: Clever, Writing, Thinking

Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice.

Topics: Years, Justice, Welcome, Bookcases

If I had listened to the critics I'd have died drunk in the gutter

Topics: Inspirational, Drunk, Gutters

There are still many more days of failure ahead, whole seasons of failure, things will go terribly wrong, you will have huge disappointments , but you have to prepare for that, you have to expect it and be resolute and follow your own path.

Topics: Disappointment, Path, Stills

People should be beautiful in every way - in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts, and in their innermost selves.

source: - Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Ronald Hingley (1998). “Five Plays”, p.138, Oxford University Press, USA

Topics: Beautiful, Self, People

One usually dislikes a play while writing it, but afterward it grows on one. Let others judge and make decisions,

Topics: Writing, Play, Judging

Advertising is the very essence of democracy.

Topics: Essence, Democracy, Transcendentalism

They say philosophers and wise men are indifferent. Wrong. Indifference is a paralysis of the soul, a premature death.

Topics: Wise, Men, Soul, Premature Death

In all the universe nothing remains permanent and unchanged but the spirit.

Topics: Spirit, Remains, Universe

He is an emancipated thinker who is not afraid to write foolish things.

Topics: Writing, Foolish, Not Afraid

Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress; when I get tired of one, I spend the night with the other.

Topics: Tired, Science, Night, Medical Education, Medical Science

When asked, "Why do you always wear black?", he said, "I am mourning for my life.

Topics: Mourning, Black, Said

...and with a burning pain in my heart I realized how unnecessary, how petty, and how deceptive all that had hindered us from loving was. I understood that when you love you must either, in your reasonings about that love, start from what is highest, from what is more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their accepted meaning, or you must not reason at all.

Topics: Pain, Love You, Heart

You must trust and believe in people or life becomes impossible.

Topics: Trust, Believe, People, Trust Issues, I Trust You

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Topics: Inspirational, Moon, Glasses, Inspiration To Write, Broken Glass

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

Topics: Lying, Writing, Stories, Novel Writing, Story Writers

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

Topics: Men, Land, Rivers, Dry Up, Wild Life

Doctors are just the same as lawyers; the only difference is that lawyers merely rob you, whereas doctors rob you and kill you too.

source: - Ivanov I

Topics: Funny, Doctors, Law, Robbery, Black Humor

Formerly, when I would feel a desire to understand someone, or myself, I would take into consideration not actions, in which everything is relative, but wishes. Tell me what you want and I'll tell you who you are.

Topics: Wish, Desire, Want

A litterateur is not a confectioner, not a dealer in cosmetics, not an entertainer. . . . He is just like an ordinary reporter. What would you say if a newspaper reporter, because of his fastidiousness or from a wish to give pleasure to his readers, were to describe only honest mayors, high-minded ladies, and virtuous railroad contractors.

Topics: Honesty, Giving, Wish, Newspaper Reporters

In descriptions of Nature one must seize on small details, grouping them so that when the reader closes his eyes he gets a picture. For instance, you'll have a moonlit night if you write that on the mill dam a piece of glass from a broken bottle glittered like a bright little star, and that the black shadow of a dog or a wolf rolled past like a ball.

Topics: Dog, Stars, Eye, Small Details

One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.

Topics: Mean, Promise, Rifles, Loaded

Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write and would write with great pleasureEither I am a fool and a self-conceited person, or I am a being capable of becoming a good writer; I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me-whence I draw the conclusion that no one is doing what is needed, and I alone know the secret of how it should be done. In all likelihood everyone who writes thinks that. In fact, the devil himself will be brought to his knees by these questions.

Topics: Moving, Writing, Conceited

There isn't a Monday that would not cede its place to Tuesday.

Topics: Monday, Tuesday

Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author's own conscience.

Topics: Effort, Police, Criticism

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.

Topics: Thinking, Rifles, Stage, Loaded

Let the things that happen on the stage be just as complex and yet just as simple as they are in life. For instance, people are having a meal, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created, or their lives are being smashed up.

Topics: Simple, People, Meals

I am writing a play which I probably will not finish until the end of November. I am writing it with considerable pleasure, though I sin frightfully against the conventions of the stage. It is a comedy with three female parts, six male, four acts, a landscape (view of the lake), lots of talk on literature, little action and tons of love.

Topics: Love, Writing, Play

I still lack a political, religious and philosophical world view - I change it every month - and so I'll have to limit myself to descriptions of how my heroes love, marry, give birth, die, and how they speak.

Topics: Love, Religious, Philosophical

Anyone who says the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imageryYou are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

Topics: Writing, Artist, Two

When describing nature, a writer should seize upon small details, arranging them so that the reader will see an image in his mind after he closes his eyes. For instance: you will capture the truth of a moonlit night if you'll write that a gleam like starlight shone from the pieces of a broken bottle, and then the dark, plump shadow of a dog or wolf appeared. You will bring life to nature only if you don't shrink from similes that liken its activities to those of humankind.

Topics: Dog, Writing, Eye, Small Details, Arranging

Dear sweet unforgettable childhood.

Topics: Sweet, Children, Childhood

It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.

Topics: Sister, Brother, Father

Flies purify the air, and plays - the morals.

Topics: Play, Air, Moral

When a person hasn't in him that which is higher and stronger than all external influences, it is enough for him to catch a good cold in order to lose his equilibrium and begin to see an owl in every bird, to hear a dog's bark in every sound.

Topics: Dog, Order, Bird, External Influences

Write only of what is important and eternal.

Topics: Writing, Important

Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!

Topics: Life Is, Please

Just as I shall lie alone in the grave, so, in essence, do I live alone.

Topics: Lying, Essence, Graves

I am now and have always been a stranger to the realm of practical matters.

Topics: Ignorance, Matter, Stranger

To live simply to die is by no means amusing, but to live with the knowledge that you will die before your time, that's really is idiotic

Topics: Mean, Live Simply, Amusing

I long to embrace, to include in my own short life, all that is accessible to man. I long to speak, to read, to wield a hammer in a great factory, to keep watch at sea, to plow. I want to be walking along the Nevsky Prospect, or in the open fields, or on the ocean - wherever my imagination ranges.

Topics: Life, Ocean, Men, Open Fields

All I wanted was to say honestly to people: 'Have a look at yourselves and see how bad and dreary your lives are!' The important thing is that people should realize that, for when they do, they will most certainly create another and better life for themselves. I will not live to see it, but I know that it will be quite different, quite unlike our present life. And so long as this different life does not exist, I shall go on saying to people again and again: 'Please, understand that your life is bad and dreary!'

Topics: Long, People, Important

People's destinies are so different. Some people drag along, unnoticed and boring—they're all alike, and they're all unhappy. Then there are others, like for instance you—you're one in a million. You're happy—

Topics: Destiny, People, Unhappy, One In A Million

I'm the seagull. No, that's not it. I'm an actress. That's it.

Topics: Actresses, Seagull

A writer should not so much write as embroider on paper; the work should be painstaking, laborious.

Topics: Writing, Paper, Should

It's even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.

Topics: Recovery, Holiday, People

Idea for a short story. The shore of a lake, a young girl who's spent her whole life beside it, a girl like you She loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.

Topics: Girl, Men, Lakes

"Do you know," Ivan Bunin recalls Anton Chekhov saying to him in 1899, near the end of his too-short life, "for how many years I shall be read? Seven." "Why seven?" Bunin asked. "Well," Chekhov answered, "seven and a half then."

Topics: Life, Years, Half, Chekhov

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

Topics: Heart, Night, Keys

It's not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.

Topics: Writing, Thinking, Soul

When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.

Topics: Grace, Action, Persons

It's worth living abroad to study up on genteel and delicate manners. The maid smiles continuously; she smiles like a duchess on a stage, while at the same time it is clear from her face that she is exhausted from overwork.

Topics: Maids, Faces, Study, Living Abroad, Duchess

When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.

Topics: Desert, Credit, Each Day

An expansive life, one not constrained by four walls, requires as well an expansive pocket.

Topics: Wall, Pockets, Four, Four Walls

Can words such as Orthodox, Jew, or Catholic really express some sort of exclusive personal virtues or merits?

Topics: Catholic, Merit, Virtue, Exclusive

In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.

Topics: Russia, Suffering, Poverty

In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish that is their strength.

Topics: Pieces, Rubbish, Should

He who doesn't know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others' successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.

Topics: Aliens, Affair, Should, Public Affairs

What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won't seem important at all.

Topics: Important, Serious, Forgotten, Future Time

To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!

Topics: Moscow

That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.

Topics: Can Not

In short stories it is better to say not enough than to say too much, because, because--I don't know why.

Topics: Stories, Too Much, Enough

A man wants nothing so badly as a gooseberry farm.

Topics: Men, Want, Culinary

Try to reason about love, and you will lose your reason.

Topics: Trying, Reason

If there's a gun on the wall in act one, scene one, you must fire the gun by act three, scene two. If you fire a gun in act three, scene two, you must see the gun on the wall in act one, scene one.

Topics: Wall, Book, Gun

You only have to start a job of work to realize how few decent, honest folk there are about.

Topics: Inspirational, Jobs, Honest

Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.

Topics: Creative, Criticism, Negative, Negative Criticism

I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it's tobacco, then let it be tobacco.

Topics: Wife, Today, Speak

In countries where there is a mild climate, less effort is expended on the struggle with nature and man is kinder and more gentle.

Topics: Country, Struggle, Men, Man And Nature

Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.

Topics: Lying, Men, Ducks, Vixens

In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn't the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.

Topics: Suicide, Men, Thinking, Spaciousness, Congestion

By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.

Topics: People, Firsts, Appearance, Good Breeding

Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.

Topics: Angry

I'm in mourning for my life.

Topics: Mourning

Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.

Topics: Beautiful, Sports, Games, Social Class

The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

Topics: Ideas, Numbers, Understanding

All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.

Topics: Sage

Then I feel so happy and at the same time so sad, it's unimaginable.

Topics: So Sad, Feels

I swear fearfully at the conventions of the stage.

Topics: Theatre, Conventions, Stage

A tree is beautiful, but what's more, it has a right to life; like water, the sun and the stars, it is essential. Life on earth is inconceivable without trees.

Topics: Beautiful, Stars, Water, Plant A Tree, Right To Life

It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense. Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything. The stupider they are, the wider they conceive their horizons to be. And if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees - this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.

Topics: Time, Thinking, Artist, Charlatans, Steps Forward

There are no small number of people in this world who, solitary by nature, always try to go back into their shell like a hermit crab or a snail.

Topics: Numbers, People, Trying, Crabs, Hermit Crabs

The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.

Topics: Looks, Ticklish, Placid

Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.

Topics: Mean, Goal, Achieve

We live not in order to eat, but in order not to know what we feel like eating.

Topics: Order, Eating, Feels

[Ognev] recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.

Topics: Two, Laughing, Three, Wranglers

Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.

Topics: Cities, Suffering, Moscow

Death can only be profitable: there's no need to eat, drink, pay taxes, offend people, and since a person lies in a grave for hundreds or thousands of years, if you count it up the profit turns out to be enormous.

Topics: Lying, Years, People

Each of us is full of too many wheels, screws and valves to permit us to judge one another on a first impression or by two or three external signs.

Topics: Two, Judging, First Impression, Valve

Silence accompanies the most significant expressions of happiness and unhappiness: those in love understand one another best when silent, while the most heated and impassioned speech at a graveside touches only outsiders, but seems cold and inconsequential to the widow and children of the deceased.

Topics: Children, Expression, Silence, Deceased, Inconsequential

Women can't forgive failure.

Topics: Forgiving, Can't Forgive

I can't accept "our nervous age," since mankind has been nervous during every age. Whoever fears nervousness should turn into a sturgeon or smelt; if a sturgeon makes a stupid mistake, it can only be one: to end up on a hook, and then in a pan in a pastry shell.

Topics: Mistake, Stupid, Age, Stupid Mistake, Pastries

If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.

Topics: Thinking, People, May

The time has come for writers, especially those who are artists, to admit that in this world one cannot make anything out, just as Socrates once admitted it, just as Voltaire admitted it.

Topics: Time, Artist, World

After us they'll fly in hot air balloons, coat styles will change, perhaps they'll discover a sixth sense and cultivate it, but life will remain the same, a hard life full of secrets, but happy. And a thousand years from now man will still be sighing, "Oh! Life is so hard!" and will still, like now, be afraid of death and not want to die.

Topics: Men, Air, Years, Sixth Sense, Air Balloons

The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings.

Topics: People, Understanding, Sorrow, Spiteful, Understanding Each Other

Nothing can be accomplished by logic and ethics.

Topics: Ethics, Logic, Accomplished

You've only got to begin to do anything to find out how few honest, honourable people there are. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I think: "Oh Lord, you've given us huge forests, infinite fields, and endless horizons, and we, living here, ought really to be giants.

Topics: Sleep, Thinking, People, I Can't Sleep

What truth? You see where truth is, and where untruth is, but I seem to have lost my sight and see nothing. You boldly settle all important questions, but tell me, dear, isn't it because you're young, because you haven't had time to suffer till you settled a single one of your questions? You boldly look forward, isn't it because you cannot foresee or expect anything terrible, because so far life has been hidden from your young eyes? You are bolder, more honest, deeper than we are, but think only, be just a little magnanimous, and have mercy on me.

Topics: Eye, Thinking, Sight, Magnanimous, Important Questions

And I despise your books, I despise wisdom and the blessings of this world. It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage. You may be proud, wise, and fine, but death will wipe you off the face of the earth as though you were no more than mice burrowing under the floor, and your posterity, your history, your immortal geniuses will burn or freeze together with the earthly globe.

Topics: Wise, Book, Blessing, Burrowing

Useless pursuits and conversations always about the same things absorb the better part of one's time, the better part of one's strength, and in the end there is left a life grovelling and curtailed, worthless and trivial, and there is no escaping or getting away from it—just as though one were in a madhouse or prison.

Topics: Escaping, Useless, Prison, Madhouses

I was oppressed with a sense of vague discontent and dissatisfaction with my own life, which was passing so quickly and uninterestingly, and I kept thinking it would be a good thing if I could tear my heart out of my breast, that heart which had grown so weary of life.

Topics: Heart, Thinking, Tears

If an intelligent, educated, and healthy man begins to complain of his lot and go down-hill, there is nothing for him to do but to go on down until he reaches the bottom--there is no hope for him. Where could my salvation come from? How can I save myself? I cannot drink, because it makes my head ache. I never could write bad poetry. I cannot pray for strength and see anything lofty in the languor of my soul. Laziness is laziness and weakness weakness. I can find no other names for them. I am lost, I am lost; there is no doubt of that.

Topics: Writing, Intelligent, Men

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

Topics: Real, Writing, Men, Real Human

Desription should be very brief and have an incidental nature.

Topics: Should

No matter how corrupt and unjust a convict may be, he loves fairness more than anything else. If the people placed over him are unfair, from year to year he lapses into an embittered state characterized by an extreme lack of faith.

Topics: Years, People, Lapses, Convicts

To advise is not to compel.

Topics: Advise

A sweet lie is more gracious for us than a virulent but real truth.

Topics: Sweet, Real, Lying, Real Truth

I should think I'm going to be a perpetual student.

Topics: Thinking, Students, Should

The past,' he thought, 'is linked with the present by an unbroken chain of events flowing one out of another.' And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of that chain; that when he touched one end the other quivered.

Topics: Past, Events, Unbroken, Chain Of Events

Every coming year is as bad as the previous one, the only difference being that in most cases it is even worse.

Topics: Years, Differences, Cases

Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.

source: - "Misfortune". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1886.

Topics: Hard Times, People, Feelings

There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.

source: - "The Teacher of Literature". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1894.

Topics: Being Yourself, Depressing, Insulting, Banality

Even in Siberia there is happiness.

Topics: Siberia

This life of ours...human life is like a flower gloriously blooming in a meadow: along comes a goat, eats it up---no more flower.

Topics: Flower, Life Is Like, Blooming

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!

Topics: Suffering, Purpose, Mystery, Three Sisters

And what does it mean -- dying? Perhaps man has a hundred senses, and only the five we know are lost at death, while the other ninety-five remain alive.

Topics: Mean, Men, Dying

If you want to work on your art, work on your life.

Topics: Art, Growth, Want

It's better to live down a scandal than to ruin one's life.

Topics: Scandal, Ruins

A naive man is nothing better than a fool. But you women contrive to be naive in such a way that in you it seems sweet, and gentle, and proper, and not as silly as it really is.

Topics: Sweet, Silly, Men

A woman can become a man's friend only in the following stages - first an acquantaince, next a mistress, and only then a friend.

Topics: Friendship, Sex, Men, Bad Friend

Fine. Since the tea is not forthcoming, let's have a philosophical conversation.

Topics: Philosophical, Tea, Conversation, Forthcoming

This man, who for twenty-five years has been reading and writing about art, and in all that time has never understood anything about art, has for twenty-five years been hashing over other people's ideas about realism, naturalism and all that nonsense; for twenty-five years he has been reading and writing about what intelligent people already know and about what stupid people don't want to know--which means that for twenty-five years he's been taking nothing and making nothing out of it. And with it all, what conceit! What pretension!

Topics: Art, Stupid, Reading

When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.

Topics: Grief, Heart, Giving

He always seemed to women different from what he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man created by their imagination, whom they had been eagerly seeking all their lives; and afterwards, when they noticed their mistake, they loved him all the same.

Topics: Love, Mistake, Men

I think human beings must have faith or must look for faith, otherwise our life is empty, empty. To live and not to know why the cranes fly, why children are born, why there are stars in the sky. You must know why you are alive, or else everything is nonsense, just blowing in the wind.

Topics: Stars, Children, Thinking, Cranes, Stars In The Sky

[Six principles that make for a good story:] 1. Absence of lengthy verbiage of a political-social-economic nature; 2. total objectivity; 3. truthful descriptions of persons and objects; 4. extreme brevity; 5. audacity and originality: flee the stereotype; 6. compassion.

Topics: Compassion, Objectivity, Political, Lengthy

In Moscow you sit in a huge room at a restaurant; you know no one and no one knows you, and at the same time you don't feel a stranger. But here you know everyone and everyone knows you, and yet you are a stranger -- a stranger... A stranger, and lonely...

Topics: Lonely, Moscow, Rooms

I have no will of my own. Never did. Limp and lily-livered, I always obey - is it possible that's attractive to women?

Topics: Lilies, Attractive

What a fine weather today! Can’t choose whether to drink tea or to hang myself.

Topics: Funny, Sarcastic, Humorous, Fine Weather

At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.

source: - "Gooseberries". Short story by Anton Chekhov, 1898.

Topics: Happiness, Happy, Responsibility

You will not become a saint through other people's sins.

source: - Anton Chekhov (2015). “The Collected Works of Anton Chekhov: Novellas, Short Stories, Plays, Letters & Diary: Three Sisters, Seagull , The Shooting Party, Uncle Vanya, Cherry Orchard, Chameleon, Tripping Tongue, On The Road, Vanka, Ward No. Six, Swedish Match, Nightmare, Bear, Reluctant Hero, Joy…”, p.3781, e-artnow

Topics: People, Saint, Sin

When a person is born, he can embark on only one of three roads of life: if you go right, the wolves will eat you; if you go left, you’ll eat the wolves; if you go straight, you’ll eat yourself.

Topics: Three, Born, Persons

It is easy to be a philosopher in academia, but it is very difficult to be a philosopher in life.

Topics: Academia, Philosopher, Easy

It's easier to ask for money from the poor than from the wealthy.

Topics: Money, Poor, Easier

My love is like a stone tied round my neck; it's dragging me down to the bottom; but I love my stone. I can't live without it.

source: - Anton Chekhov (2012). “The Cherry Orchard”, p.33, Courier Corporation

Topics: Love Is, Stones, Necks

Every person lives his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy.

source: - "A Chekhov lexicon" by William Boyd, www.theguardian.com. July 3, 2004.

Topics: Real, Interesting, Secrecy

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