Anton Chekhov Quotes
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All great sages are as despotic as generals, and as ungracious and indelicate as generals, because they are confident of their impunity.
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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.
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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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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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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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Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
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People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
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Great Jove angry is no longer Jove.
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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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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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How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.
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A woman can only become a man’s friend in three stages: first, she’s an agreeable acquaintance, then a mistress, and only after that a friend.
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'Crutch is coming! Crutch! The old horseradish.'
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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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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.
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To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
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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.
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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.'
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When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
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One had better not rush, otherwise dung comes out rather than creative work.
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By all means I will be married if you wish it. But on these conditions: everything must be as it has been hitherto-that is, she must live in Moscow while I live in the country, and I will come and see her. ... I promise to be an excellent husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear every day in my sky.
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Not everyone knows when to be silent and when to go. It not infrequently happens that even diplomatic persons of good worldly breeding fail to observe that their presence is arousing a feeling akin to hatred in their exhausted or busy host, and that this feeling is being concealed with an effort and disguised with a lie.
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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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I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.