Anton Chekhov Quotes
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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
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If you can’t distinguish people from lap-dogs, you shouldn’t undertake philanthropic work.
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Better to perish from fools than to accept praises from them.
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I divide all literary works into two categories: Those I like and those I don’t like. No other criterion exists for me.
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It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
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To describe drunkenness for the colorful vocabulary is rather cynical. There is nothing easier than to capitalize on drunkards.
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They say: 'In the long run truth will triumph;' but it is untrue.
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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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Hypocrisy is a revolting, psychopathic state.
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
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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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I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
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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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I don’t care for success. The ideas sitting in my head are annoyed by, and envious of, that which I’ve already written.
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Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
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Of course politics is an interesting and engrossing thing. It offers no immutable laws, nearly always prevaricates, but as far as blather and sharpening the mind go, it provides inexhaustible material.
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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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Who but a stupid barbarian could burn so much beauty in his stove and destroy that which he cannot make?
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Children are holy and pure. Even those of bandits and crocodiles belong among the angels.... They must not be turned into a plaything of one’s mood, first to be tenderly kissed, then rabidly stomped at.
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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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I try to catch every sentence, every word you and I say, and quickly lock all these sentences and words away in my literary storehouse because they might come in handy.
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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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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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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.