Anton Chekhov Quotes
-
I was so drunk the whole time that I took bottles for girls and girls for bottles.
-
It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
-
If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.
-
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.
-
Nothing lulls and inebriates like money; when you have a lot, the world seems a better place than it actually is.
-
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.
-
Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
-
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.
-
Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
-
When in a serious mood, it seems to me that those people are illogical who feel an aversion toward death. As far as I can see, life consists exclusively of horrors, unpleasantnesses and banalities, now merging, now alternating.
-
In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.
-
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?
-
People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the non-existent, of the non-human.
-
The thirst for powerful sensations takes the upper hand both over fear and over compassion for the grief of others.
-
All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
-
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
-
The world perishes not from bandits and fires, but from hatred, hostility, and all these petty squabbles.
-
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.
-
The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.
-
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.