Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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I’m in mourning for my life.
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Love is a great thing. It is not by chance that in all times and practically among all cultured peoples love in the general sense and the love of a man for his wife are both called love. If love is often cruel or destructive, the reason lies not in love itself, but in the inequality between people.
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Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.
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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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She read a lot, wrote letters without the letter ъ, …
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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As I shall lie in the grave alone, so in fact I live alone.
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When a person expends the least amount of motion on one action, that is grace.
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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 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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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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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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It is a poor thing for the writer to take on that which he doesn’t understand.