Anton Chekhov Quotes
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You are right to demand that an artist engage his work consciously, but you confuse two different things: solving the problem and correctly posing the question.
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Satiation, like any state of vitality, always contains a degree of impudence, and that impudence emerges first and foremost when the sated man instructs the hungry one.
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My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take. Such is the program I would adhere to if I were a major artist.
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A grimy fly can soil the entire wall and a small, dirty little act can ruin the entire proceedings.
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We shall find peace. We shall hear the angels, we shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
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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.
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People should be beautiful in every way—in their faces, in the way they dress, in their thoughts and in their innermost selves.
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People love talking of their diseases, although they are the most uninteresting things in their lives.
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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
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Better a debauched canary than a pious wolf.
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In one-act pieces there should be only rubbish-that is their strength.
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I have in my head a whole army of people pleading to be let out and awaiting my commands.
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The bourgeoisie loves so-called 'positive' types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.
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I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.
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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.
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Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.
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I don’t know why one can’t chase two rabbits at the same time, even in the literal sense of those words. If you have the hounds, go ahead and pursue.
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There is no Monday which will not give its place to Tuesday.
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Narrative prose is a legal wife, while drama is a posturing, boisterous, cheeky and wearisome mistress.
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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.
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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.
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Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
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Ah, but ignorance is better. At least then there's hope.
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Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.