Anton Chekhov Quotes
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There is something beautiful, touching and poetic when one person loves more than the other, and the other is indifferent.
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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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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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At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.
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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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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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It’s not a matter of old or new forms; a person writes without thinking about any forms, he writes because it flows freely from his soul.
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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.
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Death is terrible, but still more terrible is the feeling that you might live for ever and never die.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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Dear, sweet, unforgettable childhood! Why does this irrevocable time, forever departed, seem brighter, more festive and richer than it actually was?
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He who doesn’t know how to be a servant should never be allowed to be a master; the interests of public life are alien to anyone who is unable to enjoy others’ successes, and such a person should never be entrusted with public affairs.
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'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
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It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.
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Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.
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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.
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
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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.