Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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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.
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It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
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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.
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I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.
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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
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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.
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There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the non-existent, of the non-human.
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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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It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
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Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
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All Russia is our orchard.
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'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
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Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
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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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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
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Everyone judges plays as if they were very easy to write. They don’t know that it is hard to write a good play, and twice as hard and tortuous to write a bad one.
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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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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.'
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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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.
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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.
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.