Anton Chekhov Quotes
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All Russia is our orchard.
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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.
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'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.'
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
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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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It always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.
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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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It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
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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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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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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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Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
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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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The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
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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.
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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.
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Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
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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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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.
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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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I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.
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To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!