Anton Chekhov Quotes
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Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
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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.
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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.
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All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
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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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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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There is not a single criterion which can serve as the measure of the non-existent, of the non-human.
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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.
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It is easier to ask of the poor than of the rich.
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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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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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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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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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Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
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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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By nature servile, people attempt at first glance to find signs of good breeding in the appearance of those who occupy more exalted stations.
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'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
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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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Ognev recalled endless, heated, purely Russian arguments, when the wranglers, spraying spittle and banging their fists on the table, fail to understand yet interrupt one another, themselves not even noticing it, contradict themselves with every phrase, change the subject, then, having argued for two or three hours, begin to laugh.
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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All Russia is our orchard.
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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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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
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It doesn’t matter that your painting is small. Kopecks are also small, but when a lot are put together they make a ruble. Each painting displayed in a gallery and each good book that makes it into a library, no matter how small they may be, serve a great cause: accretion of the national wealth.