Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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When performing an autopsy, even the most inveterate spiritualist would have to question where the soul is.
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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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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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Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
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I’m in mourning for my life.
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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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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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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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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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Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.
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You ask 'What is life?' That is the same as asking 'What is a carrot?' A carrot is a carrot and we know nothing more.
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Watching a woman make Russian pancakes, you might think that she was calling on the spirits or extracting from the batter the philosopher’s stone.
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Country acquaintances are charming only in the country and only in the summer. In the city in winter they lose half of their appeal.
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One must speak about serious things seriously.
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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.
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Sports are positively essential. It is healthy to engage in sports, they are beautiful and liberal, liberal in the sense that nothing serves quite as well to integrate social classes, etc., than street or public games.
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There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
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Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing 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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Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does.
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The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring.
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He who constantly swims in the ocean loves dry land.
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Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.