Anton Chekhov Quotes
-
It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
-
She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
-
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.
-
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.'
-
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.
-
'Grigory Petrovitch, let us weep, let us weep with joy!' he said in a thin voice, and then at once burst out laughing in a loud bass guffaw. 'Ho-ho-ho! This is a fine daughter-in-law for you too! Everything is in its place in her; all runs smoothly, no creaking, the mechanism works well, lots of screws in it.'
-
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.
-
A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
-
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.
-
Faith is an aptitude of the spirit. It is, in fact, a talent: you must be born with it.
-
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.
-
She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
-
Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
-
I would love to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche on a train or boat and to talk with him all night. Incidentally, I don’t consider his philosophy long-lived. It is not so much persuasive as full of bravura.
-
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.
-
Probably nature itself gave man the ability to lie so that in difficult and tense moments he could protect his nest, just as do the vixen and wild duck.
-
The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
-
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.
-
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
-
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.
-
How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
-
The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
-
To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
-
You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!