Anton Chekhov Quotes
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I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them.
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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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Life is a vexatious trap; when a thinking man reaches maturity and attains to full consciousness he cannot help feeling that he is in a trap from which there is no escape.
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'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
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Wherever there is degeneration and apathy, there also is sexual perversion, cold depravity, miscarriage, premature old age, grumbling youth, there is a decline in the arts, indifference to science, and injustice in all its forms.
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He is no longer a city dweller who has even once in his life caught a ruff or seen how, on clear and cool autumn days, flocks of migrating thrushes drift over a village. Until his death he will be drawn to freedom.
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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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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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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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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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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
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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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Как легко, доктор, быть философом на бумаге и как это трудно на деле!
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The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
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It’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
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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.
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The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.
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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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All Russia is our orchard.
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A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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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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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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When a person doesn’t understand something, he feels internal discord: however he doesn’t search for that discord in himself, as he should, but searches outside of himself. Thence a war develops with that which he doesn’t understand.