Anton Chekhov Quotes
-
Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
-
That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
-
If only one tooth aches, rejoice that not all of them ache.... If your wife betrays you, be glad that she betrayed only you and not the nation.
-
If I were asked to chose between execution and life in prison I would, of course, chose the latter. It’s better to live somehow than not at all.
-
We old bachelors smell like dogs, do we? So be it. But I must take issue with your claim that doctors who treat female illnesses are womanizers and cynics at heart. Gynecologists deal with savage prose the likes of which you have never dreamed of.
-
Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
-
It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
-
I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
-
It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
-
I feel more confident and more satisfied when I reflect that I have two professions and not one. Medicine is my lawful wife and literature is my mistress. When I get tired of one I spend the night with the other. Though it's disorderly it's not so dull, and besides, neither really loses anything, through my infidelity.
-
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.
-
Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.
-
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.
-
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.
-
All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
-
By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.
-
There are no lower or higher or median moralities. There is only one morality, and it is precisely the one that was given to us during the time of Jesus Christ and that stops me, you and Barantsevich from stealing, offending others, lying etc.
-
The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing.
-
By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto-that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
-
We fret ourselves to reform life, in order that posterity may be happy, and posterity will say as usual: 'In the past it used to be better, the present is worse than the past.'
-
'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
-
One can prove or refute anything at all with words. Soon people will perfect language technology to such an extent that they’ll be proving with mathematical precision that twice two is seven.
-
Lermontov died at age twenty-eight and wrote more than have you and I put together. Talent is recognizable not only by quality, but also by the quantity it yields.
-
To regard one’s immortality as an exchange of matter is as strange as predicting the future of a violin case once the expensive violin it held has broken and lost its worth.