Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
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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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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.
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
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Love is a scandal of the personal sort.
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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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A fiancé is neither this nor that: he’s left one shore, but not yet reached the other.
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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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To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow!
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How intolerable people are sometimes who are happy and successful in everything.