Anton Chekhov Quotes
-
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.
-
The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!
-
There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
-
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.'
-
Lying is the same as alcoholism. Liars prevaricate even on their deathbeds.
-
It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.
-
All Russia is our orchard.
-
Eyes-the head’s chief of police. They watch and make mental notes. A blind person is like a city abandoned by the authorities. On sad days they cry. In these carefree times they weep only from tender emotions.
-
Prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and abstinence from meat.
-
What seems to us serious, significant and important will, in future times, be forgotten or won’t seem important at all.
-
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.
-
I’m in mourning for my life.
-
The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
-
The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
-
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.
-
I observed that after marriage people cease to be curious.
-
It has become customary to say that a man needs only six feet of land. But a corpse needs six feet, not a person.
-
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.
-
When you live on cash, you understand the limits of the world around which you navigate each day. Credit leads into a desert with invisible boundaries.
-
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.
-
When we retreat to the country, we are hiding not from people, but from our pride, which, in the city and among people, operates unfairly and immoderately.
-
In order to cultivate yourself and to drop no lower than the level of the milieu in which you have landed, it is not enough to read Pickwick and memorize a monologue from Faust.... You need to work continually day and night, to read ceaselessly, to study, to exercise your will.... Each hour is precious.
-
She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
-
It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.