Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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 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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Do you know when you may concede your insignificance? Before God or, perhaps, before the intellect, beauty, or nature, but not before people. Among people, one must be conscious of one’s dignity.
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All Russia is our orchard.
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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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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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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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Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
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The air of one’s native country is the most healthy air.
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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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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.
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It is unfortunate that we try to solve the simplest questions cleverly, and therefore make them unusually complicated. We should seek a simple solution.
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It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.
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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter.
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I’m in mourning for my life.
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Tsars and slaves, the intelligent and the obtuse, publicans and pharisees all have an identical legal and moral right to honor the memory of the deceased as they see fit, without regard for anyone else’s opinion and without the fear of hindering one another.
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It is uncomfortable to ask condemned people about their sentences just as it is awkward to ask wealthy people why they need so much money, why they use their wealth so poorly, and why they don’t just get rid of it when they recognize that it is the cause of their unhappiness.
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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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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
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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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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.
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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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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.