Anton Chekhov Quotes
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All Russia is our orchard.
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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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I’m in mourning for my life.
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
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Those who come a hundred or two hundred years after us will despise us for having lived our lives so stupidly and tastelessly. Perhaps they’ll find a means to be happy.
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People who live alone always have something on their minds that they would willingly share.
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There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its farthings, victuals, vacuous conversations, and useless conventional virtue.
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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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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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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.
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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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When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
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Neither I nor anyone else knows what a standard is. We all recognize a dishonorable act, but have no idea what honor is.
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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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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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Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
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'Why do I love him so much, mamma? Why do I feel so sorry for him?' she went on in a quivering voice, and her eyes glistened with tears. 'Who is he? What is he like? As light as a little feather, as a little crumb, but I love him; I love him like a real person. Here he can do nothing, he can't talk, and yet I know what he wants with his little eyes.'
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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 always seems to the brothers and the father that their brother or son didn't marry the right person.
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Is it our job to judge? The gendarme, policemen and bureaucrats have been especially prepared by fate for that job. Our job is to write, and only to write.
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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!
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Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does.