Anton Chekhov Quotes
-
It’s even pleasant to be sick when you know that there are people who await your recovery as they might await a holiday.
-
Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
-
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.
-
To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
-
It is depressing to hear the unfortunate or dying man jest.
-
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
-
She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
-
It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
-
Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
-
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.
-
It seems to me that all of the evil in life comes from idleness, boredom, and psychic emptiness, but all of that is inevitable when you become accustomed to living at others’ expense.
-
The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
-
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.
-
In Western Europe people perish from the congestion and stifling closeness, but with us it is from the spaciousness.... The expanses are so great that the little man hasn’t the resources to orient himself.... This is what I think about Russian suicides.
-
I myself smoke, but my wife asked me to speak today on the harmfulness of tobacco, so what can I do? If it’s tobacco, then let it be tobacco.
-
Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
-
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.
-
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
-
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
-
What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.
-
Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
-
If you really think about it, everything is wonderful in this world, everything except for our thoughts and deeds when we forget about the loftier goals of existence, about our human dignity.
-
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.
-
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.