Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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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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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.
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The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.
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The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.
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There is no national science, just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.
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The government is not God. It does not have the right to take away that which it can’t return even if it wants to.
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The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
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Happiness does not await us all. One needn’t be a prophet to say that there will be more grief and pain than serenity and money. That is why we must hang on to one another.
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A man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man.
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When one longs for a drink, it seems as though one could drink a whole ocean-that is faith; but when one begins to drink, one can only drink altogether two glasses-that is science.
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Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?
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An artist must pass judgment only on what he understands; his range is limited as that of any other specialist—that's what I keep repeating and insisting upon. Anyone who says that the artist's field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. An artist observes, selects, guesses and synthesizes.
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Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?
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When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters but telegrams.
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One can only call that youth healthful which refuses to be reconciled to old ways and which, foolishly or shrewdly, combats the old. This is nature’s charge and all progress hinges upon it.
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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.
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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.
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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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Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
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Everyone has the same God; only people differ.
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Несчастные эгоистичны, злы, несправедливы, жестоки и менее, чем глупцы, способны понимать друг друга. Не соединяет, а разъединяет людей несчастье...
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He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.
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Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.