Anton Chekhov Quotes
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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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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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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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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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The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.
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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.
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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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Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
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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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'Why did you marry me into this family, mother?' said Lipa.'One has to be married, daughter. It was not us who ordained it.'
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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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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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The cherry orchard is now mine!... I bought the estate on which my grandfather and father were slaves, where they were not even permitted in the kitchen.
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The more simply we look at ticklish questions, the more placid will be our lives and relationships.
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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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Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.
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In two or three hundred years life on earth will be unimaginably beautiful, astounding. Man needs such a life and if it hasn’t yet appeared, he should begin to anticipate it, wait for it, dream about it, prepare for it. To achieve this, he has to see and know more than did his grandfather and father.
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There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
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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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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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Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
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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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Everything is good in due measure and strong sensations know not measure.