Anton Chekhov Quotes
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Moscow is a city that has much suffering ahead of it.
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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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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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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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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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I’m in mourning for my life.
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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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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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Despicable means used to achieve laudable goals render the goals themselves despicable.
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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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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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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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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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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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Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.
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There is nothing more awful, insulting, and depressing than banality.
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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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'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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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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Isolation in creative work is an onerous thing. Better to have negative criticism than nothing at all.
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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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Good breeding doesn't mean that you won't spill sauce on the tablecloth, but that you won't notice when someone else does.