Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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’s easier to write about Socrates than about a young woman or a cook.
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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.
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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.
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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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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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Only during hard times do people come to understand how difficult it is to be master of their feelings and thoughts.
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Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
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The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
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That can not possibly be, because it could never possibly be.
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How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
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Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
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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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What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.
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People understand God as the expression of the most lofty morality. Maybe He needs only perfect people.
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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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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.
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You look at any poetic creature: muslin, ether, demigoddess, millions of delights; then you look into the soul and find the most ordinary crocodile!
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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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All Russia is our orchard.
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In general, Russia suffers from a frightening poverty in the sphere of facts and a frightening wealth of all types of arguments.
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I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.
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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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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.